Free download: http://quixodelic.com/site/the-best-of-the-daydream-generation-0910/

So here it is. The final page in the last chapter of the Daydream Generation, a 30-song compilation called ‘The Best of The Daydream Generation 09/10′.

Thanks to a terrible year in 2009, we only managed to put together one compilation and the traditional ‘Best of…’ felt pretty pointless. Now, with three DG compilations in 2010, as well as three Quixodelic Record samplers to choose from, this one has been the most difficult to put together yet. So difficult in fact that I couldn’t even narrow it down to a single CD of songs. The first 23 tracks were as close as I could get, but the last 7 were all so great and would have graced either previous ‘Best of…’ that I had to include them. Who knows if anyone even bothers burning downloads to disc these days, but if you do, then take your pick from the 30, or split them into two discs. Whatever you do, I hope you enjoy them. They were chosen for a number of reasons – the songs most commented on, the tracks most played, and sometimes just the ones I love the most.

We’ll be keeping Quixodelic Records going into the foreseeable future, but the DG compilations have always been such an important part of what we do that I’d like to bore you stupid with some thank you’s to everyone who has helped over the years, especially Tim, and especially Kris, Davyd, and Becky, my Cozy Home comrades, and all the bands and songwriters who have been with us from the very beginning, and those who would have been if they’d known about it. Most importantly I’d like to thank everyone who has ever taken the time to download one of these compilations. Seconds are precious and there is so much music out there, but you’ve invested yours in the little guys and girls of the music world. Sometimes the songs have been really weird. Maybe at other times they haven’t been so good. But more often than not I think we’ve helped show that there is a whole other world of words and melodies and sounds happening beneath the bottom rung that can feed your head and fill your heart and make you feel like things are far more interesting than they seem.

As a last goodbye to the comps, I’ve been trawling through the songs and compiling my 100 favourite Daydream Generation songs of all time (a ‘Very Best of The Daydream Generation’ would be impossible). I’ll be posting these in batches between now and New Year at the http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/dg100/ link at the top of the site.

Until whatever shape or form the next adventure takes, I wish you all the best.

Thanks again for listening.

Smally

Free download: http://quixodelic.com/site/daydream-generation-10/

So here we are, at The End.

Nearly four years ago when this little project started I really thought that the possibilities were limitless. Nine compilations, hundreds of songwriters, and thousands of minutes of music later, I still haven’t given up on the idea that mix-tapes can save the world. Just they won’t be my mix-tapes.

But before we go, here’s a penultimate collection of 38 tracks, some new, some old, some fragile, some bold, some voices and sounds you will recognise from compilations before, and a few who are new for your listening pleasure. Daydream Generation 10 is the usual two-disc curious assortment of lo-fidelity musical oddities. Here’s a quick overview of what you can expect to find:

ZOMBIE GIRLFRIEND HOSPITAL ATTACK FORCE going melodically insane on the brilliantly titled ‘Let’s Perpetual Camera’ from the forthcoming album ‘Positives’. If this guy isn’t the future of DIY psychedelia then strike me down with a bolt of lightning. Nope, no lightning. As I suspected.

BE BOLD BRAVE ROBOT are the sort of band who make me reconsider throwing in the towel every time I listen to their inventive pop masterpiece ‘Take A Deep Breath’. There are few occasions when you hear a band for the first time and know implicitly that you are going to love everything that they do. This is one of those bands.

I can’t believe it has taken me this long to get round to listening to NICK FRAELICH’s music. A heady collision of experimental electronic folk sounds and surrealist pop, ‘The Meta-Song’ is a track that slaps you in the face and demands to know why you haven’t discovered it sooner. Absolutely fucking magic.

Anyone who has been here before doesn’t need to be reminded how much I love the music of Syd Lane. ‘Astride A Grave’ is taken from thee album of 2010, ‘It Begins In Beauty’, recorded under the moniker of CHANSONS DE GESTE. We have a lot of great records in the Quixodelic Record Store, but this one is truly something astonishingly special with it’s soaring vocals, simple melodies, and heartfelt lyrics. And of all the great songs on it, this one is possibly my favourite.

IMPALED PEACH returns with ‘Autumntide’, a carefully polished slice of self-recorded psychedelic pop. This is the sort of guy fledgling musicians should set out trying to emulate for clarity and inventiveness of recording, capturing the dark psych of Olivia Tremor Control and combining it with soulful Cohen-esque tones. You’d expect nothing less really.

THE ANTELOIDS are the reincarnation of The Sound who were featured on Daydream Generation No9. Several years on and the development is quite stunning, the lo-fi Spiritualized influenced sounds of the past making way for a more polished high octane sonic assault on your eardrums, as shown here on the aptly named ‘Invasion of the Cosmic Monsters’.

Singing from a similar psychedelic hymn sheet, THE CURIOUSLY STRONG PEPPERMINTS return to the DG comps with ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’. As much as I loved their first album (Endless Fields of Poppy), if this is anything to go by, then up and coming ‘Echoes From The Ultraviolet Fuzz’ (spring 2011, Sunshine Cortex Records) is upping the ante. Undoubtedly influenced by The Flaming Lips, the brains behind the band Mr. Soniclovenoize Jesse Miller promises that this is one of the more mellower tracks with the band going for a more noise-pop live-sounding feel.

Another psychedelic band with a big record on the way is THE RED PLASTIC BUDDHA. Having heard several tracks from ‘All Out Revolution’, it is safe to say that Tim Ferguson & Co are covering just about every version of psych-pop-rock imaginable, adding their own accomplished sounds to transport you back forty-three years and two seasons ago to the summer of love. And you’re all invited.

PHASETRON are a new name on the Daydream Generation and I can’t tell you much about them. What I can tell you is that their contribution ‘ For The Cape’, produced by the elusive W in Cape Girardeau, is nothing short of mind-blowing. It takes a talent, or a group of talented individuals to make guitar-pop sound original and quite unlike anyone else, but these guys have somehow managed it.

ALLAN DOUGLAS returns to the DG with a live version of ‘Pacifico’ from 2008’s much lauded album ‘Lipstick Pickup’. If anything, the live version so different from its polished studio version, that it might as well be a different song. Think Johnny Cash with an ability to hit the high notes playing country-blues on the run from the cops. That there were no amphetamines consumed during the making of this song is beyond me. It’s fierce.

You just never know what you are going to get with THE ORANGE DROP. Sometimes it is psychedelic bomb songs dropped on your head from twenty thousand feet, other times it is shoegaze walls of sound surrounding your ears in the equivalent of a musical ambush. ‘Ginger Girl’ is a softer, more studious side, complete with the predictably unpredictable fuzzy guitar sounds and mind-expanding melodies. It’s a weird old world we live in when The Orange Drop sound this sane.

There are several bands called ROLLERCOASTER out there, but there is only one who can make you feel like the Jesus And Mary Chain are alive and well and playing on through the generations. ‘Happy’ is… surprise, surprise a happy pop song from Helter Skelter, something a little bit different from the usual high energy psychedelic anthem we’ve come to expect, but still recognisable as the band we’ve grown to dig.

Here’s a new project called HONEYDRUM. This first glimpse of this band, a dark but oddly poppy track called ‘Don’t Worry About Boys’ suggests that there is plenty to get excited about. You can check out their web page at http://honeydrum.bandcamp.com and get information about soon to be released cassettes at http://honeydrum.tumblr.com.

The lovely Norman Chaplin, curator of the monthly ‘A Pile of Lo-Fi‘ compilations is not a one-trick pony. Not only does he have an ear and energy to put together such a brilliant project, but he also moonlights as LUNO, purveyor of anti-folk lo-fi experimental pop. ‘Dog Perspective’ on DG9 was such a cracking original little tune, and ‘Blank Slate’ is more of the same, a previously unreleased spoken word electronic ditty that deserves a home between your ears.

Appearing on a Daydream Generation comp for the first time, GHOSTS give us ‘Song For Disappearing’. Ben says that this is a song recorded in his old apartment on the outskirts of Paris last winter ‘about finding some new place that feels like home, and the exciting planning stages that precede such an escape’. It’s a catchy track, a mixture of electronic energy and intimate vocals that make this band well worth checking out.

Definitely definitely the last record I’ll ever make, ‘King’s Short Memory’ is the first of (hopefully) an album worth of tracks from THE PAINTED SHUTS. I owe a lot to Paul Burnout and were it not for him there would undoubtedly have been no more Wheelies recordings after ‘Oh Happiness’, and subsequently no Daydream Generation. I’ve worked with a lot of very talented people over the years, but collaborating on music with Paul has always been the easiest. Going by previous Painted Shuts recordings, we always start out in first gear, so it will get better. IF I can find that keyboard jack.

From The Painted Shuts to THE UTICA FLOWER COMPANY. Once upon a time they were one and the same thing, but now with the release of ‘The Utica Flower Company 2.0′ they are more like two bubbles within a bubble within a bubble. I’m very proud of being involved in this record and though it may not pack the punch of some other albums I’ve worked on, there is a whole iceberg of word-thoughts beneath every track. ‘Daydreamer Gasoline’ is W at his finest, stuck on an inflatable Ark on an infinite ocean and drying out from a fictional drug addiction.

There is a holy trinity of DEAD CANARIES tracks. ‘Ghost In A Photograph’ is one. ‘Bird Peach’ is another. Both have previously been featured on compilations I’ve put together. ‘Something’ is the third, and finally I’ve persuaded Jon of the Atom to let me use it. From the truly brilliant ‘Something Else’ in 2009, Katie Saul belts out a modern folk-anthem that even Jon himself can’t quite believe he wrote. One of my favourite songs ever.

You know FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)? Bobby Rogan, master of the two minute musically-upbeat-lyrically-downbeat guitar-pop anthem? Well think again. ‘We Love You’ is the first single from imminent Fig Mints record ‘Say Okay’. It’s a noisy return to the sounds of the brilliant ‘Bad Choice Brigade’, only chugging under extra squalls of shoegaze sonic feedback. Something tells me that whatever he is making over on that side of the puddle is going to be epic.

Oh LENN9O9N… As the last DG comp fades out I will forever be haunted by the fact that he wouldn’t let me use the irresistible lo-fi ‘Nina’s Paw Got Stuck’. Three times I have asked him and three times he’s hawed telling me that the song in question is rubbish. Thankfully he has made up for it three times with tracks like ‘Treat It Like A Joke/Fan In Waiting’ – two songs for the price of one. An abandoned opening track for a solo record that is presently sitting on a back burner while he cooks up something special with Zakk Zielke, this is the aptly named Lenn9o9n at his very, very best.

It’s an honour and a pleasure to see Pierre aka CARTON SONORE return with an unreleased track from 2008 called ‘Dehors Il Fait Froid !’ (that’s ‘Outside It’s Cold’). A bustling cinematic instrumental, it’s the perfect music for staggering around in the snow, full of clacking clicking instruments, organs and what sounds like an accordion. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but either way I fucking love it.

A developing birthday tradition in the FAILEDSITCOM family, this song was written and recorded for his sister. You just can’t help but feel happy listening to Sam’s careful interweaving of hip-hop and folk-pop, murmured vocals, shimmering melodies, fluttering beats. Long may the birthday tradition continue!

So having recently fallen completely in love with DRESSED LIKE WOLVES’ ‘I Could Walk On Water, But I’d Rather Part The Sea’ (number one contender for my favourite album of 2010), it is a privilege to feature one of Rick’s demos on another DG compilation. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for anyone who loves hearing home-made lo-fi magic, then it is a must. Armed with an acoustic guitar, a glockenspiel, and a voice as pure as uncut drugs, ‘Anniversary’ is a welcome addition to the Dressed Like Wolves back-future catalogue.

No longer William Carpenter and the Towering Trees, and just TOWERING TREES, you would be forgiven for wondering what they did with Will. Thankfully he’s still there with his golden voice and observational lyrics, just they shortened the name to make it easier to write/spell/say. ‘Rude Sex’ is as fine as any William Carpenter song, a four-piece band set-up playing an old sixties style riff like a poppier version of The Strokes, and Will doing his thing over the top of it. It’s simply effective.

Finally. JAMES REDMOND has written a Christmas song. Upon completion of  ’Lonely Christmas Time’ at the 11th hour on deadline day, a team of crack commandos immediately removed it from under his nose and zoomed across the rooftops of Liverpool to email it from an internet cafe to me. Obviously it was worth the wait and has been duly added to the Smally family Christmas CD in between Slade and Bing Cosby. And for the 10th consecutive compilation Jay has the honour of being the last song in. Nobody else would get away with it.

‘The Birthday Party’ by THE GODFREY REPORT is another Allan Douglas project, an instrumental track for a film he recorded earlier this year. It’s pretty great stuff – like The Beach Boys on vacation in Nashville orchestrating a wild west themed horror show with guitars and swirling organs. If that doesn’t sell it to you, then nothing will.

SHADOW PUPPETS is a side project of Warchalking’s from several years ago that may or may not ever see the light of day. Seemingly on the operating table now for as long as I’ve known him, occasionally I hear drips and clips but rarely do I get a full song served up on a plate to feast upon. ‘Listen To You’ suggests that the wait might be worth it. Think a song plucked from the first Warchalking album, breaking into the recording studio after dark, hunched over the microphone with a mysterious full band in the shadows behind him. There’s even a guitar solo.

I’m so glad we got VINCENT NIFIGANCE back for a second compilation. With arguably the best record covers and album titles in the business, ‘Transistor’ is from ‘The Self-Fulfilling Secondary Stumbling Prophecy’ (see?). Noise has never sounded as infectious as this, sawing and hammering out a song with a melody that is positively unshakeable. A+++ out of 10.

What can I say about SIMON PILER that I haven’t said somewhere before? This guy has taught me more in the last year and a half than I learned in the nine years post-University before virtually meeting him. He’s a poet, a musician, an artist, and a magician, he was born from a dew drop and has a little theatre inside his chest, he wears a raven magic hat and has a little pointy beard that delights kids on aeroplanes… oh, and he spearheads the Atom Band, as you can hear on the typically folktastic ‘Swing Close To Me’. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

I’ll let Kellan Stover from WINTER PAINTED WHITE do the talking about his music. ‘I’m Kellan Stover. Previously the drummer for General Oglethorpe and the Panhandlers before leaving on amicable terms, I now focus on my solo act, Winter Painted White, that had taken the back burner for a while. While still a hobby, and no means my bread and butter (I’m actually an illustrator), I find songwriting and recording a very personal and cathartic process. It sounds contrived to say that I write songs for myself and those close to me, but for the most part it’s true. When your biggest fan is your girlfriend, you know you’re not breaking out or being added to a strangers playlist far, far away.’ Having heard five of his songs including ‘The Traveler And His Worn Out Shoes’ I can safely say that WINTER PAINTED WHITE is one of many really undiscovered gems that are glimmering somewhere out there and his music really deserves more attention.

There’s only so many times you can be told that a band are worth checking out before you make a little space to see what all the fuss is about. THE YATARIS are one of those bands. I’ve lost count of the people who have recommended I check out their daunting double-album ‘Mean Winter/Joyous Praise’ on CLLCT, and I wonder how many people there are like me out there, following the crumbs and still waiting for a space to open up? But if anything is going to kick us into gear then it’s tracks like ‘Africa’ – an acoustic indie pop punk adventure of a song, with one foot in the world of lo-fi and another in a place that is weirdly Yatari. Count myself duly kicked.

‘Everything’ was the last song I recorded as THE WHEELIES, testing out a microphone that I was kindly sent by JOTA to solve the five year problem of hiss. As you can see, it’s a Bright Eyes cover and I neglected to speak the speaking parts because when I talk I sound Scottish and quite silly. I used to sing my kids to sleep with this one until someone put a padlock on the strings of my ukulele and (perhaps deliberately) misplaced the key.

After 15 years THE REAL BURNOUTS have gone digital. Fully expecting to hear some sort of 69-track beast of experimental psychedelia, instead we get ‘Bubble Design Soundproof Machine’ a drum, four-note guitar, strummed chords, and the most beautiful lyrics you could ever imagine piece of musical simplicity and off-the-wall genius. Feeling is believing.

It’s great to finally have a JEREMIAH JAMES poem on a compilation. I’ve heard him read and read his stuff myself many times before and am always blown away by the Blakeian grandeur and consideration of Jer’s words and ideas. ‘Dev And The Tyger’ is one of those real poems of weight and meaning, loaded with observational emotion and as timeless a piece of spoken word poetry as I’ve heard.

Bear with me on this one. ROCKETSHIPS OF LOVE head honcho Paul Le Keux was picked up at a strip club in Rugby at the end of summer and flown into space with a mission to make a soundtrack for the second book of The Utica Flower Company ship adventure. Of all the people I know, he was the only one I could have asked to attempt it. Recruiting the ghosts of Joe Meek and Delia Derbyshire, the three of them have been locked in our Recording Studio ever since making the most incredible full-length space record. ‘Optical-Nerve Nourishment…’ is a track from this record and it is fucking epic. You can hear a selection of tracks from the new ROL at http://theuticaflowercompany.wordpress.com/soundtracks/

And to end the last open Daydream Generation compilation we have a guy who has been there from just about the beginning. His name is KEITH RICHARD CRAIN, but you might also know him as Sucks To LaLa Land, and before that River Speak English. As always Keith has contributed a Dylanesque folk-lullaby, this time called appropriately ‘It’s All Over Now’. It was just too beautifully titled and sung to not make it the last ever song.

And with that we’re very nearly done.

Thanks to everyone who helped put this particular compilation together and I will thank everyone at length next week when I put together the final comp.

This mix-tape might not save the world, but I hope you enjoy listening to it all the same.

s

We are now taking submissions for the 10th Daydream Generation compilation – deadline 10th December. Email us an mp3 and some info about your music to quixodelic@gmail.com

Thanks to everyone who has been submitting tracks and requesting reviews for the last couple of months. Unfortunately due to us being trapped inside a book, we’ve been slack on replying – however, all transmissions we received will be considered.

Looking forward to hearing some new music.

thestreetlampdoesntcast.blogspot.com/2010/08/griff-says-time-to-become-daydream.html

Neat little article on The Daydream Generation with some glowing words about Daydream Generation 9 from this very cool music blog. Also features a couple of Sad Panda videos of their favourite songs from the compilation. Go show some support and subscribe!

Out Now!

Download it for FREE at:

quixodelic.com/site/category/the-daydream-generation/

Disc One
1 The People (Scotland) – Two Roads
2 Sighrens – Live It Up
3 Insomniatic – Divination and the rest of that whole something
4 James Redmond – Hemlines And Hairstyles
5 Lenn9o9n – Black Light to the Blue World
6 Motherbird – Mathieu
7 J. Schnitt – The White Sheets
8 Zombie Girlfriend Hospital Attack Force – Nemesis Closes The Holocene
9 The Real burnouts – Fires In Hell
10 Luno – Dog (Perspective)
11 Will Weber – Special Secrets
12 The Space Between Things – In The Night Time
13 Uberfuzz – Epistle to a Wayward Mother
14 William Carpenter & The Towering Trees – Calvin
15 Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination) – Peep-Hole
16 The Wheelies – Don’t Twist My Nipples
17 Dressed Like Wolves – Bewitched2
18 Keith Richard Crain – Youv’e got a home
19 Vincent Nifigance – Hug, Hug (Bleuch)

Disc Two
20 The Virgo 9 – End of The Road
21 The Mondo-City Motorpsychos – Pretty Little Picture
22 The Red Plastic Buddha – Soldier Boy
23 Syd Lane – You For Me
24 Frogville – Could
25 The Falling Floors – I’ll Never Change
26 Honeymoon – Crickets Aren’t Awkward
27 Dead Canaries – Peach Jam
28 Garden On A Trampoline – The Tide
29 Impaled Peach – Avalanche
30 The Delfields – I Felt Your Shape
31 FailedSitcom – November 5th, 1992
32 Carton Sonore – Thème 20 (Dérive)
33 Broken Folk – Higher
34 Arnold Gallows – Board the Nark
35 The Hall of Mirrors – Rivers In Your Eyes
36 A Noble Ghost – Black Smoke Rising
37 Handwithlegs – Neck Trunk
38 Venice Gas House Trolley – Brain Cells Are Invisible
39 The Utica Flower Company – Second Garden
40 Becky N – Come Back Over
41 Rollercoaster (UK) – Oh Lord Supersonic Spacerider
42 Simon Piler and The Atom Band – sold for wind

So there was this guy. He was always complaining about having too much music to listen to and not enough time. His inbox was forever jammed with songs people send him, and every other week somebody he liked released a record that demanded numerous minutes of attention. But then one day in July 2010, he realised for the first time in a very long time that he didn’t have anything new to hear. It was a rare and rather tiny window of opportunity, and rather than sitting back and soaking up the silence, he forged forward and sent out some emails, and before he actually knew what was happening, he was back in the hurricane of another Daydream Generation compilation…

Obviously the guy is me and the compilation is this one… No9 No9 No9 No9 No9 No9 No9 No9 No9 No9 No9… and my inbox is flooded again, and the window is smashed, and my brain has taken a beating like only a DG compilation can administer. Anyone who knows me knows when I say I don’t have enough time, that circumstances dictate that I really should have next to no time at all, so putting this thing together has been a feat of endurance, extremely fast typing, stolen zombified seconds, and just finishing something started. I haven’t even had a chance to reply to all the contributions (we had at least 20+ too many to fit) – but I’ll try and apologise as soon as I can… submissions that didn’t make it onto No9 will roll over onto the next project, be it podcast or compilation.

Thankfully the songs we did have space for more than make up for the missing brain cells and blisters on the tips of typing fingers. Thanks to everyone who helped put this together behind the scenes, especially Paul Le Keux for the cover art. Now usually at this point, here’s where I give a blow-by-blow account of the two discs, telling you how wonderful all the songs are and why you should love them as much as I do; but this time around I’m going to leave it for a few days before I start writing. So for now, you’re just going to have to go and love them all by yourself. Or with some friends. Maybe on an imaginary bus somewhere. Like us. Shit, did I just say ‘imaginary bus’? Somebody stop me… I’m feeling the breeze from another really tiny window of opportunity opening up, and we all know what happened the last time imaginary modes of transportation appeared as a throwaway joke in a babble like this one. Some of us are still recovering from that particular trip. Okay, why are you still reading this? Shoo… go listen to the new compilation. At 233MB it’s a BIG file, but it’s well worth the minutes or hours it’ll take you to download it. And please let us know what you think.

Smally

13th July – Thanks to everyone who suggested names. Above is a short-list picked by a panel of gophers high on life in a secret underground bunker on the moon. Please help us ONE LAST TIME by voting for your favourite name. Poll will close when the gophers are satisfied there is a clear winner.

…

For a few months we’ve been thinking about starting an online magazine to promote, review, do features on DIY unsigned bands and songwriters. Only problem is that between a handful of us we just can’t come up with a name that everyone likes.

Any suggestions?

Bearing in mind this project should hopefully last for years and we’ll be stuck with whatever we choose.

No prizes for the best answer, just kudos and a sense of self-satisfaction that you have helped out people helping out people.

Also, while I’m here, if anyone would like to contribute to the ezine with no name as a writer or an artist or tea-boy/coffee-girl, then get in touch at quixodelic@gmail.com. We’d be looking for reviews on records you love (nothing mainstream – they’ve got their own machine to take care of them), interviews with bands you know who deserve some exposure, and philosophical monologues about anything vaguely music related. And lots of coffee for late-night head scratching.

Congratulations, it’s a penguin.

We are now taking submissions for the ninth – yes, ninth – Daydream Generation compilation. Closing date is the 31st July.

In case you are new to this site and don’t have a clue what I’m on about, here are some frequently asked questions, and frequently answered answers:

What is a Daydream Generation compilation?

A Daydream Generation compilation is a musical gathering of people who sing songs in their bedrooms and basements, compressed into mp3 format for portability and quickness of download, and carefully ordered inside a zip file for people who want to hear something new for free. We’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember (well actually, that’s something of an exaggeration, March 2007 to be exact) and it seems to work. Unsigned bands and lovely songwriters without the juggernaut of a publicity machine behind them, get to showcase their talents, sing to the universe, and attempt to blow brains, all the while surrounded by their cherry-picked peers. The rest of us get to stand back at a safe distance and listen. Check out previous compilations here: quixodelic.com/site/category/the-daydream-generation/ to see what I mean.

What kinds of music are you looking for?

From the guts, quirky, lifted from cassettes held together with sticky tape, lo-fi, hi-fi, original compositions, cover versions, long lost songs that never found a place to go, valiant attempts at saying something but failing, spoken word, instrumentals, film scores, pop songs, live jams around a campfire burning worryingly high, stuff with fluffed notes, dreams translated into notes, psychedelic anthems, experimental field recordings, white noise, in-jokes recorded with the last desperate flick of the switch before passing out, songs with guitars, songs without guitars, things nobody has heard before, songs that make you want to dance, songs that reaffirm your belief that people are (after all) okay, songs that make the stars look just that little bit brighter… Basically, what I’m trying to say is anything goes.

That said, we can’t promise to like everything we hear. But we will try our best.

How do I submit a song and what else do you need?

Email an mp3 to quixodelic@gmail.com

Easy-peasy eh?

Anything else isn’t necessary, but stuff like links to any of your websites and a paragraph about yourself/the song you are submitting can be helpful when we’re writing up reviews.

That’s pretty much that.

Smally

It’s a brave new world and we’re embracing it from behind the safety of a computer screen. You can now catch up, stay ahead of, and get involved with the Daydream Generation and Quixodelic Records in the following places…

CLLCT

http://cllct.com/art/daydreamgeneration

The hub of free music. That big warehouse in the middle of a field you go to in secret to dance to ukeleles and drone and other genres that will make your eyeballs pop out of their sockets. Hundreds of artists and thousands of records at the click of a button for nothing. And now all 8 of the DG compilations are there in revised single-disc format. The plan is that sometime in 2010 we’ll reissue them all as cassettes on Quixodelic. Tracks were chosen based on popularity in previous Best Of polls and a clandestine meeting behind the scenes where people in skull masks picked their favourites.

EVERYONE SHOULD JOIN CLLCT

LAST FM

http://www.last.fm/label/Quixodelic+Records

As well as CLLCT, all of the compilations can now also be found on Last FM for you to play away your day while you daydream out the window. Would be nice to see some more tracks available from all of the people that have featured on the DG compilations… there’s only so many times I can listen to the same songs (hint hint).

FACEBOOK

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2582186690

Let’s face it. MySpace is dead. I’ll keep clocking in, but I’m finding it hard to not vomit with all the crap they’re trying to force-feed me in terms of advertising and “exclusives”. We’ll make our own exclusives thank you very much. Facebook on the other hand is undoubtedly the devil’s work… but… it’s very useful for getting the word around, finding out who’s up for contributing to a compilation, even so that we can easily promote what each other are doing simply by sharing a link. So I’d urge you all to join the group. No more moon missions I promise… just good new-fashioned free music and sooner or later tapes on tap. Newcomers are most welcome.

and finally for those of you who like to Twit

TWITTER

http://twitter.com/quixodelic

I’ve not quite figured out what this one is for yet, but I’m willing to follow anyone to the ends of the earth and back if they can write a great song on their bedroom floor or point me in the direction of someone else who can.

Okay, back to your window and your warehouse

smallougby

DAYDREAM GENERATION 8 – OUT TODAY

Free Download: 38 tracks of the finest lo-fi folk pop psychedelic electronica and ‘other’ we could find from great little bands & artists & uke-strumming urchins all around the globe in two neat zip files of mp3s. Enjoy.

CLICK HERE

And here we go again. It’s been very nearly three years since the words “Daydream Generation” jumped into my head triggering the endless quest to go out and find the very best undiscovered DIY music there was to find, to cook the songs together in a couple of sizzling zips and serve them up to you on a virtual plate, dear and often strange listeners.

For several months back there I forgot why I was cooking – the compilations were almost getting too easy to put together, feedback was fading, and it was like “So what? Another compilation?” But putting together DG8 (with the help of Simon Piler and Becky N on recruitment duties), I remembered what it is I love about doing this – discovering new music that blows me away, bands and names that people on your street are unlikely to have heard of, yet more often that not, are as brilliant, and maybe even more relevant than whatever the mainstream decides is the flavour of the month. Music is like fast-food these days – mass-produced, served up lukewarm and tasteless with a fanfare of advertising and a side order of apathy. The thing I love best about home-cooking is that it is free – not free in the download sense (although this compilation is), but free in the sense that song-writers can take chances, and make music for the love of making music, free to throw whatever they can find at the backs of the cupboards of their minds into the creative frying pan. I think DG8 was the compilation that re-ignited my excitement and like the various cooks and kooks who appear here, I’ve always loved that we can take chances with the mix. On Daydream Generation 8 you will find songs to fill your belly, and songs that will leave a really weird taste in your mouth… but everything you will hear comes with the guarantee that it was cooked with love, and not to sell something big and shiny, or make somebody a quick buck. In particular thanks to the David-esque might of a little site called CLLCT putting our 8th compilation together has been less like mining, and a lot more like walking up to a big crazy tree and plucking colourful fruit from singing branches. Many of the bands and artists featuring on this compilation have been lifted from such shimmering limbs and without that site, I’d have been back crawling through the tunnels of the fallen Goliath that is MySpace hoping to find something, anything, someone, and all the while thinking ‘all this narcissism… the world is fucked.’ We could have made a thousand compilations from what we have discovered on CLLCT – and who knows, quite possibly we will.

But enough of all this small talk. Let’s get down to business and let the music do the talking. Without further ado allow me to introduce the 38 bands that make up Daydream Generation 8:

ADRIAN AARDVARK

Someone Else

I wonder how many of the world’s iPods kickstart on this guy? If “Someone Else” is anything to go by then the world could do a lot worse.  Belted out with unreserved punk angst, this track treads the precarious tightrope of insanely catchy and flat out insane, and manages by the skin of its teeth to make it over to the other side intact. Songs like this are rarities, stolen from the seabed of a nightmare at the shadowy end of pop, and there is no doubting the sincerity. AA+

Adrian Aardvark on CLLCT

AKRYLLIC LOVE

Smiling Today

Let’s get through this and not mention the age thing, alright? If you haven’t heard of Akryllic Love by now, then I’ll bet you my matchbox house that someday (even if you hadn’t read this) then you would have. This is the kind of song-writer that someday you’ll tell your grandkids about, and somebody you might just be hearing a whole lot more from on this Quixodelic corner of the internet real soon. AL’s contribution ‘Smiling Today’ is (as expected) a two minute slice of slightly experimental DIY pop brilliance. This guy makes the idea of expressing yourself in an originally entertaining way look easy, each song like a bubble blown down the brain lanes. The most frightening part? He’s only…

Akyrllic Love on CLLCT

ASSAULT SQUAD SAFETY SCISSORS

To try and break the fickle hearts of the romantics who wanna sing along

There’s something incredibly endearing about the whole Assault Squad Safety Scissors package. Mostly just one guy and his guitar singing really great pop songs, Oklahoma’s Andrew Allingham has an eye for really neat cartoon art, very interesting song titles, and melodies that make you stop and realise that you’ve vanished for the entire time you’ve been listening. Sometimes it feels like the world is awash with Lo-Fi bedroom pop songsmiths, but hey, that’s a good thing, right? Especially when they sound like this.

Assault Squad Safety Scissors on CLLCT

BECKY N

Coma Dream

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again just so as you know that I mean it. These compilations just wouldn’t be the same without a Becky N song. It would be like the Generation without the Daydream. ‘Coma Dream’ is taken from her second EP ‘4am Video Games’, recorded as part of the Utica Flower Company’s Invisible Box-Set project. A dark, twisting almost-spoken almost-sung tale of a poetic adventure that sounds too eerily real to be a dream, this song, with its urgent finger picking and claustrophobic intimacy is exactly why so many people can’t help but utterly dig her music.

Becky N on CLLCT

BESPECKLED EGG

Summer Fruits

Years from now, this will go down as “the DG compilation where we finally gave into the ukulele”. Leading the 4-string nylon charge is Bespeckled Egg, singing out a poem about summer fruits (and apples). It has a meandering and innocently infectious life of its own, like a small pop jazz trumpeter searching for melodies and finding them and losing them again, before whispering one of the most curiously catchy little qualifiers you might ever hear on record. Walking past the fruit stands in your local grocery store might never be the same again. *Today this has been my favourite song on the entire compilation… I’m not saying it still will be tomorrow, but it’s always today that counts.

Bespeckled Egg on CLLCT

BETHESDA ANN

Birds

Now this is a spellbinding voice. All the way from a part of Texas where apparently they have pine-trees and may or may not wear cowboy hats, Bethesda Ann has a way of singing that sounds like it belongs in another world. ‘Birds’ is one of a whole load of great songs that appear on her record ‘Everything Is Gold’, a smoky, crackling, dreamlike ballad that defiantly defies genres on the needle-strewn forest floor. I’ve heard this song about twenty times in the last week and it still isn’t losing its other-worldly charm. If you’re not mesmerized by it then I will eat my own hat.

Bethesda Ann on CLLCT

BRENDON HERTZ AND THE BURNT ORANGE  CRAYONS

Sacrifice

From Brendon Hertz’s brilliant album ‘Sacrifice’, the title track in all its melancholic reggae glory. For the Invisible Box set we crammed together 12 records and from all of them this song was undoubtedly one of my favourites. I’d love to say it is representative of Brendon’s work, but actually every song of his is different, like a genre-hopping untraceable beat poet of the 21st century so if you like this and go looking for a reggae record, then go look somewhere else. If however you’re looking for a bit of everything, then now you know where to look.

BRIAN AND THE WORLD

Song For Elm Street

Ah, this guy knocked me clean off my cloud the first time I heard him, and when he sent me ‘Song For Elm Street’ (having clambered back up to cumulus heights) it knocked me straight back off again. Some people have to battle against every gene they inherited to make something of some audible worth, but there are others like Brian (far fewer in number) who sound as if they were born to write brilliant songs. It almost makes you nervous when you stumble across someone with such natural talent, like standing at the top of a musical flume that you know will hurtle downwards forever, making it near impossible to listen to anyone else for several months. Definitely one of my favourite songs from three years worth of compilations.

Brian and the World on CLLCT

BROKEN MONO

Day By Day

As much as I love hearing something specially recorded for these compilations, I also like it when we provide a home for a long lost song. Grizzly psychedelic veteran of the DG compilations Broken Mono (you know the one I mean, cat’s head, Hendrix riffs) managed to dig up this ‘oldie from the days of 4-track’.  ’Day By Day’ is a much more traditional guitar pop song than we’re accustomed to hearing from planet cat, but it’s just as kind and catchy to the ears.

Broken Mono on MySpace

THE CANADIETTES

Both Wearing Dentures

The songs of Cordelia Hazel sound like they belong to the middle of the 1990s. It is an interesting and maybe not even deliberate way of looking backwards to look forwards. While just about every man and his girlfriend and her dog try their best to recreate the sounds and sights of the undisputed heavyweight decade of music (60s), The Canadiettes are content to strum simple acoustic chord patterns for Cordelia to sing her lovely songs over. ‘Both Wearing Dentures’ is a pretty good example of how to pack a melodic punch just by sounding like yourself, and it’s very, very diggable.

The Canadiettes on CLLCT

CHANSONS DE GESTE

Not A Poet Be

Well everyone knows what I think of Syd Lane’s voice and songs so I’m not going to bore you by telling you how amazing both are again. Instead I’ll tell you about ‘Not A Poet Be’ from the recent Chansons De Geste record ‘It Begins In Beauty’. Originally this wasn’t one of the songs that leaped out of it (in my defence that record is packed with melodic gems), but over time I’ve increasingly found myself involuntarily hearing it between my ears, the soaring notes and weight of the words… DIY probably isn’t ever going to sound as pure as this again, so love it while you can.

Chansons De Geste on MySpace

CHELSEA MARIE

The Sixth Thing That Happened To Me

It’s a feat in itself being able to not take yourself too seriously and yet still produce relatively serious songs about being. It would seem that Chelsea Marie is happy to grab a guitar, press play on the tape recorder and just let it run while she pipes out unashamedly cute little existential folk songs. ‘The Sixth Thing That Happened To Me’ is a rare moment of the sort of song-writing genius that happens when the tape runs, something so simple and yet pretty fucking profound, the sort of song that snapshots a whole generation in little more than two minutes, bursting with fuck ups and hope for the future. Keep the tape rolling.

Chelsea Marie on CLLCT

COOTIE SHOT

Bluetooths

I think this picture pretty much sums up the music of Cootie Shot, lo-fi pop on the living room floor with friends kicking around in the background. Once in a while you get a combination of voices that fit like both halves of a 2-piece jigsaw puzzle, and when Kia and Spence start harmonising over the uke’s on this brilliant little song about the corporate zombie technology that is bluetooth headsets, everything slots into place. Cootie Shot are the kind of band that should inspire everyone to learn a musical instrument and sing their hearts out about the universe around them. I don’t think I could ever get tired of listening to this.

Cootie Shot on CLLCT

THE CURIOUSLY STRONG PEPPERMINTS

Transcendentalism is Like Wow

From time to time you’ve got to take your hat off to ambition. The Curiously Strong Peppermint’s man behind the songs Jesse Miller, once said ‘I somehow have to top mid-60s-era Bob Dylan’ and as far as I’m concerned you can’t aim any higher than that. If ‘Transcendentalism…’ is anything to go by, then they’re at least on the right road. With a swirling, ringing, popping multi-coloured full band sound, this is pop music getting the full psychedelic treatment, producing something curiously fresh sounding. Taken in ample doses this sort of music is very good for getting your ears to breathe. Long may they walk backwards in this direction.

The Curiously Strong Peppermints on CLLCT

DEAD CANARIES

Karl Marx Lives In Lafayette Louisiana

I’ve spoken about this one at length in a recent review of the two new Dead Canaries offerings ‘Golden Sounds’ and ‘Modern Day Carpetbagger’. ‘Karl Marx…’ is one of the real stand-out songs of the two records, a bluesy Kinks-style surrealist anthem with Jon of the Atom drawling out his distinctive vocal, the song itself breaking into Beatle-esque sections. You all know what I think about this band and these records. Just go and download them and love it for yourself. It’s free!

Dead Canaries on MySpace

FAILED SITCOM

Mortlake

Ah time. There’s just not enough of it and this guy more than anyone reminded me of that. Just half an hour more a day and I’d have realised several months ago how amazing the music of Failed Sitcom actually is. For a long time I just considered him to be the friendliest person on CLLCT, but from the first few seconds of this song I quickly realised that he’s also one of the most talented. Living proof that it is possible to fuse folk-pop with hip-hop beats, ‘Mortlake’ is a shimmering soundtrack to a dreamlike daze with fragile and seriously loveable vocals, perfect brain fodder on a cold sunny morning staggering to the bakers and nearly getting knocked over twice. The next free half an hour I get, I know exactly what I’m going to go and download.

Failed Sitcom on CLLCT

THE FALLING FLOORS

Do You Feel Uptight?

The Falling Floors are fucking flying. I mean, if Jolan and Co keep improving and climbing at this rate over the next couple of years then we’re going to be so high up that we’re staring at the new ‘Revolver’. They were great to begin with, blasting out psych-tinted pop and roll painting by numbers little anthems… but if brand new track ‘Do You Feel Uptight’, and it’s frighteningly good predecessor (the album ‘Hey! Midnight’) are anything to go by, then you better buckle up because we’re in for a seriously bumpy ride upwards. Quick look out of the window to your left and through the clouds you will hear destination all-out psychedelic sunshine pop. Assume the crash position, because this is going to be fun, fun, fun.

The Falling Floors on CLLCT

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

What Happened To Holiday?

Ladies and gentlemen I do believe this suggests that Bobby Rogan is recording again and for anyone who has ever listened to and loved a Figs record this is extremely good news. Rumours are the new record is going to be called ‘Say Okay’, although I may have just dreamed this up. Did I just dream it up? Hang on, let me check my email. No, I didn’t just dream it up and this toasty slice of home made pop would indicate that whatever it is he’s doing is going to be fucking great.

Fig Mints website

FOLK SINGING FATTIES WITH A TRUMPET

Trapfap

Some day Cameron Clarke will make me “An Introduction To The Various Musical Manifestations of Cameron Clarke”, but until that day I’m going to have to be content to steal minutes of more records than some collectives put together between them. This guy is really a one man song machine, and Folk Singing Fatties… is a file-sharing side project – ‘two dudes’ making great acoustic folk songs with comical lyrics (I hope) and a trumpet (apparently). ‘Trapfap’ is sung with poker faced brilliant harmonies and actually made me cry with laughter when I figured out what it is about. I’m not even sure if that’s cool. But it must be if Cameron’s connected to it?

Folk Singing Fatties With A Trumpet on CLLCT

FOXES IN FICTION

Snow Angels

Foxes In Fiction is a musical project from Warren Hildebrand, based in Toronto, and ‘Snow Angels’ is taken from a split EP he did with Glow Worm. As expected from anyone I’ve ever stumbled across based in the psychedelic capital of the world, his songs are predominantly electronic, but splashed with liberal lashings of that seemingly geographical specific sonic druggy spaced-out vocals. The results are supercool tracks like this, complimented with equally cool artwork. Well worth checking out if you like your experimental electronica.

Foxes In Fiction on CLLCT

GENERAL OGLETHORPE AND THE PANHANDLERS

Mary

Now this is a band to get excited about. Okay, so their name takes a lifetime to type, but that’s my only gripe. If this first track from their first demo ‘Mary’ is anything to go by then this four-piece from Georgia have got a bright melodic future ahead of them. The traditional drums and guitars format is given some bite and originality by the harmonic interplay of seriously amazing boy/girl vocals and a sweeping accordion that riffs away throughout. In many ways it sounds like an accomplished band who have been playing together for years, so it’s even more impressive that this is the first thing they’ve recorded together. Remember the name and if you need to write it down on the back on your hand then you might want to roll up your sleeve.

General Oglethorpe & the Panhandlers on MySpace

HANDWITHLEGS

I Hate Bugs

Now you know the world is getting weirder when HANDWITHLEGS records a pop song, but this here is no ordinary song, it is a song with a story. I’ll let him tell you it: “A few years ago J was studying in Germany and she bought a one-song CD off the street that just had this song on it, along with a photocopied insert with no information whatsoever. It’s been one of my all-time favourite songs since”. All I’ll say on this is that ‘I Hate Bugs’ is extremely catchy and it should come with a warning label. Which I why I just said that.

HANDWITHLEGS on Transatmospheric

IMPALED PEACH

Psycholicopter

‘Psycholicopter’ has grown on me more than any of the songs on DG8. I liked it from the first time I heard it, but I must have been in a rush because when I finally sat down in a quiet space and really listened to it from start to finish I was blown away by the intricate little uke melodies and understated vocal harmonies. Plus any song that goes ‘Ba Ba Ba’ convincingly at some point is always going to be a winner. Anyone who knows the guy behind the moniker (that’s Impaled without an ‘i’ by the way) won’t be surprised to hear something so poignantly assured, but for those of you who don’t then feel free to enjoy at an exponentially increased ratio to listens.

Impaled Peach on CLLCT

JAMES REDMOND

Tell Me

Here’s another guy who doesn’t need any introductions, throwing a bowling ball of melody your way. Fresh from my favourite cover on the White Christmas Album (‘Don’t Pass Me By’), Senor Redmond promised to attempt to get a new song to me by deadline day, but did. So you’re just going to have to make do with this little bowling ball of melodic magicalness he threw in my direction A LONG TIME after the deadline had passed. I’m sorry, I love a whole load of you, but I can’t think of anyone else who would get away with sending something in so late. Prepare to be a bowling pin.

James Redmond on MySpace

JOHN LUDINGTON

All The World Is Fin

John Ludington is more than just one of the most popular artists from the Daydream Generation compilations, and he’s a lot more than a simple singer-songwriter. New tracks appearing straight off recording sessions for a new record on a mountain-top are complex, surreal beatnik stories of characters, with involved guitar structures and vocal melodies that rise and fall and zigzag between the octaves. ‘All The World is Fin’ is the title track from his forthcoming record and if anything it is even more surreal, and even more complex than anything that has gone before, like how Nick Drake would have sounded if he’d run away and joined the circus in his teenage years…

John Ludington on MySpace

LENN9O9N

Ausdruck

It seems almost fitting that the guy with the coolest name in music might also resurrect the synthesizer as a credible musical instrument. Okay, I exaggerate a little (but not about the name) – the synth can be okay in doses, but to build entire songs and maybe someday a complete record out of that 80s machine of death? ‘Impossible’, I hear you say. Enter Lenn9o9n – an American in Italy who builds up layers of rhythm and synthetic sounds until it doesn’t just sound credible, it actually sounds amazing. ‘Ausdruck’ is dark and melodic, as much a composition as a song and a dangerous precedent. So remember kids: Synths are lethal equipment in the wrong hands. Listen to Lenn909n and if you can’t imagine yourself making music as immense as this, then please stick to the uke.

Lenn9o9n on CLLCT

LOGAN GREENE AND THE BRICKS

Why Am I Lonely?

And now somebody who makes country sound cool. Logan Greene is a singer-songwriter from Tucson Arizona who knows how to write a tune or two. Capable of kicking up a shitstorm of pop electrically, or strumming you to sleep in your Great Grandfather’s rocking chair, here we’ve got him doing the former, backed by The Bricks causing hippies to clumsily line-dance into one another while tripping over bongs and rushing home barefoot across the fields to dig out their Gram Parson’s records.

Logan Greene & The Bricks on CLLCT

MAUREEN SILL

Trip (to Heaven)

Taken from the record ‘In Four Hours I Will Feel Completely Different’, this song of Maureen Sill’s is one sixth of why this little record is so great. Struggling to pick a song from it, I went and downloaded all six and for seventy-six hours it was all I could listen to. These very lo-fi and very brilliant folk pop songs are the real deal – acoustic guitars strum, drums roll, and everything pushes the songs forward while Maureen sings poetic snapshots of the world over the top (and apparently without a microphone). It is put simply, a lovely and utterly bewitching listen.

Maureen Sill on CLLCT

OLD KING

Let’s Go Outside

This is the first thing I’ve heard from Manchester’s Old King and the early prognosis is very good. Okay, so anything involving Jolan from The Falling Floors is going to have some credibility straight away, but these kids are a different entity. ‘Let’s Go Outside’ is a reverb drenched shoegaze/psych track full of shuffling drums, drone/fuzz, ringing guitars, chiming bells, and deliciously drawled vocals. As they said in the business, one to watch.

Old King on MySpace

THE ORANGE DROP

Urban’s Front Yard

You’d be forgiven for thinking that we got this song from one of the three Orange Drop records of 2008, made in the eye of a psychedelic hurricane, when the world was there for the taking and anything seemed musically possible. But then they split up and went and formed new bands… didn’t they?Well actually they did, but now they’re back (woo hoo!) and psychedelic as ever. There are videos out there, and new songs emerging as the supersonic threesome/foursome start to stretch their hibernated limbs. ‘Urban’s Front Yard’ is a shiny new instrumental, and something of a shoegazer anthem. The psychedelic troubadours are back…

The Orange Drop on MySpace

PINEAL INDOLE

aHH ooOOoo HHa

A comp just wouldn’t be a comp without a shot of lo-fi psych-pop noise experimentation and on DG8 it falls to the brilliant Pineal Indole. Describing his project as ’self-indulgent’, actually this contribution sounds far from it. The brilliantly titled ‘aHH ooOOoo HHa’ is a fuzzy scuzzy lalalala-song with beats and bleeps and plenty of effects, loads of fun to listen to and the kind of thing that makes you wish you could rewind the hands of time back to the days of bong.

Pineal Indole on CLLCT

THE REAL BURNOUTS

Accused of Babbling

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder… along come The Real Burnouts. Now the Burnouts are weird at the best of times, but ‘Accused of Babbling’ from the album ‘Endeavouring To Make God A Liar’ is chomping on the limits of sanity. Personally I love it. There’s nobody quite like these guys to throw you a curve ball, then a fast ball, then another curve ball, and finally swallow the ball whole and run away into the woods to never be seen again. Currently promoting the theatrical masterpiece ‘The Disinfection of Walter’, complete with puppets, psychedelic lighting and live actors at a theatre probably nowhere near you, it means a lot them taking time out to throw us a song-bone like this.

The Real Burnouts website

SEALOVE

My Life Is One Big IDK

From ‘Mondays at Sunday Creek’, this song is just one example from two albums worth of examples of the Lo-Fi pop cuteness that is Sea Love. I imagine that it must be near impossible for anyone to hate this one-girl band’s music, with kooky little folk songs and catchy melodies played on a pink ukulele. ‘My Life is One Big IDK’ is a twenty year old’s wry look back over the shoulder of life with a shrug and a grin.

Sealove on CLLCT

SIMON PILER

Kochia

Here’s a rare glimpse through the giant telescope of time at Simon Piler pre-Simon Piler and the Atom Band. Salvaged from a solo EP called ‘Test’, this track ‘Kochia’ is one of a handful of somewhat atypical not-so-experimental Piler magic. Simon himself has conceded that ‘Test’ is perhaps his most accessible piece of work, straightforward (or rather more straightforward) folk guitar song structures with the much more typical all-guts Piler vocals. Here, you can borrow the magic telescope for a couple of minutes while you listen to it, but please remember to return it to Dr Simon Piler c/o Cabin 5, The Mardi, somewhere N/W of Antarctica. Thankee.

Simon Piler on CLLCT

STOMACH ULCERS

Free

Jordan is the lead singer and guitarist in Canadian band N/A, and Stomach Ulcers is his solo project. Frequently found mooching around on old couches in the middle of nowhere solving near unsolvable crimes, when he does turn his hand to picking up an acoustic and strumming his thoughts, he does a pretty good job. ‘Free’ is a mellow and tongue firmly planted in cheek folky-grunge song about not wanting to face up to the future and about loving mooching around. I think he pretty much sums up almost everyone I knew fifteen years ago in a musical nutshell.

Stomach Ulcers on CLLCT

TUCK SON

Chakra

Michael King makes seriously interesting music. The last man onto the Daydream bus, in a fog of smoke, clutching a battered tape recorder and a grin under his arm. ‘Chakra’ is a kaleidoscopic dance of ghosts around a fire in a living room that melts away revealing ancient trees with spooky faces, while the lamp in the corner becomes a setting sun a-blazing. The whole thing sounds like a lot of acoustic instruments making an electric sound as outside in the street Tuck Son drops himself into a seat near the back of the bus spilling the grin and pressing his face to the frosted glass of the window while the engine begins to rumble. And meanwhile back in the living room the ghosts dance on.

Tuck Son on CLLCT

WEIRD RIBS

North Cave

This compilation’s compulsory electronic seven minute soundscape is brought to you courtesy of Weird Ribs aka Joseph Cox. Everybody from time to time needs a track like this in their lives – something to be to, something that makes you want to close your eyes and balance on ledges, go outside barefoot in the cold to count the stars, or simply lie there really wasted in space to breathe.

Weird Ribs on CLLCT

THE WHEELIES

Pinocchio

Well it looks like this is it for me. I’m not saying I won’t rummage around in the back catalogue for a song if we’re seriously short on a compilation in future, but hopefully that’s not going to happen and our quixodelic inbox is so full with contributions that I’ll be knocking people back rather than scrabbling around at the last minute for tracks. After fifteen (or is it sixteen?) years The Wheelies are finally no more, and this is the last song I/we ever recorded called ‘Pinocchio’. I was very unhappy when I wrote it. But I’m happy now.

The Wheelies on CLLCT

______________________________________

Okay you’ve read everything you need to read, now GO AND DOWNLOAD THE COMPILATION ALL OF IT BOTH DISCS SUPPORT THE LITTLE GUYS AND GIRLS OF THE MUSICAL WORLD – YOU WON’T REGRET IT

Thanks to everyone who helped put Daydream Generation 8 together, especially Simon and Becky.

See you all again for another sometime soon.

smally

Back behind the wheel.

I’ll not bore you with the details, but here’s a brief synopsis of what just happened behind the scenes: I burned out > sailed away with the collective on an imaginary ship resolving to abandon the world of music forever > had the revelation that actually I love doing this, going out and mining for new music, lending a helping hand to the little guy and girl > resolved to take the giant step from Quixodelic downloads to Quixodelic cassettes > realised it’s been too long since the last Daydream Generation compilation and kicked off DG8 > sat down to write this.

As always I have a lot to ramble about, but it will have to wait until I’ve caught up with myself so as I can attempt to communicate it properly. The main thing I wanted to try and get across here is that we’re back up and running and this time we’re going to keep running until the the next time we fall flat on our collective face. And then we’re going to get up, dust ourselves down and keep running again, at least until I’m 64. So that’s three more decades of compilations and records, dust and rambling messages like this one. I know I’ve been on and off the bus a thousand times or more in the last three years, but this time it feels different. I’ve hung up my own songwriting hat to concentrate on what I actually love doing the most… this.

So without further ado, here are the main things to watch out for in the next few months:

DAYDREAMGENERATION.COM

Thanks to the mighty Tim of the equally mighty www.transatmospheric.com our little corner of the internet has had yet another makeover and I’m slowly but surely working at getting everything into some kind of order. A lot of the images on the site were lost when I took my eye off the proverbial ball and the googlepage I was using migrated to fuck knows where, but I’m retrieving them and replacing them. The downloads section has undergone a temporary facelift making it easier to look through and download the record you’re looking for, and I’m still wrestling with the goofy formatting on the more involved Quixodelic Records page. I’m also working on the commune adding Quixodelic artist pages with links to articles and releases (though you can also access posts concerning your favourite Quixodelic artists by clicking the pretty nifty “browse” button in the top right hand corner of the site). What I’m really trying to say here is thanks again Tim, and for those of you snooping around here for the first time then please bear in mind it’s a work in progress. In the immediate future we’ll be fixing it so as the site can be run by the collective, so expect to see a lot more names appearing at the foot of posts instead of the generic daydreamgen… whoever he or she is.

I had a thought the other day about how collectives and organizations like us sell themselves to people. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the heavy-handed all-singing all-dancing approach – I mean that’s the reason myspace is dying on its feet isn’t it? All those voices shouting ‘Look at me!’ and it just becomes a cacophony of substanceless sound. So if sites were stores I’d want the DG to be a strange little one-storey shop with  dirty windows and a hand-painted psychedelic sign above the door, down some back street you need to get lost to discover, and when you walk past it you see a couple of smiling faces quickly ducking down out of sight beneath the window making you wonder ‘What the fuck was that?’ (haha, just realised I’ve re-imagined the Flower Company all over again). Also the bell above the door wouldn’t ring when you enter, it would randomly play a song from one of the DG compilations starting with Zebra Mu. Speaking of which…

DAYDREAM GENERATION 8

Is coming together. Deadline for submissions is the 8th February. Unfortunately this time around we’re not taking submissions as we’ve been out the last couple of weeks mining new music and virtually meeting new people. There’s been some exciting discoveries as well as some great new stuff coming out of battle-hardened DG veterans, as well as some rare and lovely gems dug up from the past. Shouldn’t be too long after the 8th that you can wrap your ears around this one for yourself. If you’re interested in participating in future compilations then as always feel free to drop us an mp3 at our brand new one-word easy to remember email address. What the fuck was it again? Ah yes, quixodelic@gmail.com

QUIXODELIC RECORDS

One of the most positive things about me taking my eye of the proverbial ball is that there’s been quite a build-up of records behind the scenes that we’ll be hosting over the next couple of months. We started with the amazing ‘It Begins In Beauty’ (see previous post) by Syd Lane’s new moniker Chansons De Geste, throwing in her solo record, the equally brilliant ‘Solstice Sessions’. You can download both of these today, for free from the Downloads section.

If I type this up fast enough then there’s also a very good chance that the latest offering from Dead Canaries – another two records! – ‘Golden Sounds’ and ‘Modern Day Carpetbagger’ will be available to download over here as well. Both these records were originally released by our pioneering older sibling  Cozy Home Records only last week. Perhaps it is a waste of downloading space having the record available on both labels, but in the case of Dead Canaries whose music is an exception to every rule in the book, we’ve agreed to make them an exception to every rule in the book and host these records on both sites simply because they’re so fucking good. I don’t care where you get it from, the Flower Co or the Cozy Home… just as long as you get it and love it from somewhere.

There are of course other records in the pipeline ready to go, but I’m going to keep them under wraps for now just so as you’re going to have to keep walking past the shop window every now and again. If you haven’t subscribed to this blog for notifications then don’t worry, we’re also working on this…

LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT

That’s a tentative title.

For as long as I can remember, some of us have been talking about starting up a free downloadable magazine dedicated to DIY music, featuring the little people who are making the most important music of our generation, but unfortunately are deemed either too ‘Lo-Fi’ or an unwise investment because they don’t have an established fanbase, or are just content to make brilliant records from their bedroom. So to kill two canaries with a single stone I figured it might be nice to marry this magazine idea with a resurrected mailing-letter from the DG every quarter.

Just like the DG compilations contributors are welcome and encouraged to get in touch. You don’t have to be Hunter S Thompson, you just have to write with the same passion as he does, about your own music, about your friend’s music, about sites that are interesting or labels that deserve a mention. It’s at the formative stage, but anything goes as long as you’re singing from the same page. (And by being here I guess you are already… unless you’re one of those Russian spambots trying to sell us fungal toe-cream…). First edition we’re aiming for the 1st May 2010 so get scribbling. This is also the date that we’ll be launching…

QUIXODELIC CASSETTES

Long overdue.

It finally dawned on me that if we continue with downloads only then potentially we’re going to end up 30 years from now with nothing to show for all our hard work. Cassettes seemed like the most obvious way forward and from the beginning of May some of your favourite Quixodelic downloads will be available to purchase for a very reasonable price from the site. Why cassettes? Well if you’re asking me that then no amount of explaining is going to convince you that it’s the right way to go…

Obviously there will be more on all of this as and when it materialises, but for now the plates are spinning and if I don’t tend to them then there’s going to be an almighty crash.

Clunk, whir

It’s good to be back

Smally

Download it for FREE today!

It’s been a while, but here we go again. Back from the dead thirty-eight-song-stories high and breathing musical fire, it’s the seventh DAYDREAM GENERATION compilation. Everything you’d expect from one of our free compilations – tunes you can shake your sticks at, psychedelic sonnets, folk weirdness, electronic circuitry for the earballs, and things that go pop! in the night.

Here are some of the people you might find on there, some you may have heard of before, but even better if you haven’t: ROCKETSHIPS OF LOVE, WARCHALKING, AKRYLLIC LOVE, FROGVILLE, JAMES REDMOND, SUCKS TO LALA LAND, WHITE GUYS JUMPING, THE FALLING FLOORS, THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS, CODY HIGH SCHOOL, BROKEN MONO, BRENDON HERTZ, A NOBLE GHOST, THE PAINTED SHUTS, THE INVISIBLE MOUTH, ALLAN DOUGLAS, CHANSONS DE GESTE, SOCIETY, VOLCANO, FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION), THE REAL BURNOUTS, E. A BARTHOLOMEW, SIMON PILER AND THE ATOM BAND, JOHN LUDINGTON, VENICE GAS HOUSE TROLLEY, THE GROSVENOR SUITE, THE RED PLASTIC BUDDHA, ROLLERCOASTER, THE ORANGE DROP, JOSEPH RIDE, BECKY N, MOUSEY BROWN, THE WHEELIES, THE OUT FAMILY RAVEN, OLD NORTH, THE ARTIFICIAL SEA, UBERFUZZ, and DEAD CANARIES.

Download it for FREE right here

THE BEST OF THE DAYDREAM GENERATION 08

download: Best Of DG 08

“The Best Of The Daydream Generation 08″ is a collection of tracks from the 3 DG compilations released in 2008, as voted for by you the listening world. And perhaps unsurprisingly, you have pretty fucking great taste.

All the songs are copyright the respective artists.

A Quixodelic Record, December 2008

Well I don’t know about you, but 2008 has been something of an intense year around here for me. 17 records via a newly established download record label that goes by the name of Quixodelic (thanks Tara), and with it a humble global collective of daydreamers, 3 compilations comprising of 7 discs, 540 minutes of more new sounds and songs and bands than is entirely appropriate for your delicate ears, numerous interviews, countless reviews, a handful of videos, a couple of features, a comatose partridge in a psychdelic pear-tree, a secret underground musical society with a record that nobody really knows who recorded, and a near fatal meltdown one grey October day.

So there you have it. Is this The End or a whole new beginning? I guess I’ll leave that in your capable hands.

But

In the off-chance this is really THE END then what better way to bow out than with a 

Best Of The Daydream Generation 08

For the last couple of weeks, people have been voting for their favourite songs from our three compilations of the year, and you can do it too if you go here:

http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/have-your-say-the-best-of-dg-08/

The Best Of will probably need to be done in time for Christmas, so you’ll need to hurry if you want your vote to count. Numbers will be added up sometime in the days before the 24th without warning. So you have been warned that you won’t be warned!

I think that’s it again.

I’m away to write a couple of books.

Smally

*It’s been brought to our attention that there are a few technical glitches on the site when viewing it using Internet Explorer. We’ve (Tim’s) fixed as much of it as he can, but there are still a few issues – most notably an error message that comes up if you’re trying to vote in the Best Of 08 post. Unfortunately sometimes that’s just the way it goes & if you’re really wanting to have your say you’ll need to come back using a different web browser (such as Mozilla or Google Chrome). Hopefully this hasn’t ruined the DG experience for you too much, and thanks to those of you who pointed out that you were having problems accessing the site.

DISC ONE

THE HOBORCHESTRA – Editable Text

I can’t think of another band I hear as many great things about as I do The Hoborchestra. “You should hear the new album, it’ll blow you away”, “Cool, The Hoborchestra are on DG6, I love that band”, “Tim Kotch is my favourite songwriter” and so and so on. Of course I’m already a believer and these words are wasted on me, but I thought they’d be a worthwhile resource in explaining how well thought of this music is. “Editable Text” is their latest offering to the Daydream cause, with it’s tag-line of “Would you maybe like to come visit, I know you’re sick, but it’s Monday night and there’s good public television”, its a meandering, folky-pop song, instantly diggable for it’s wonderfully understated and vividly recognisable human warmth and fragility. Also it’s well worth hearing right to the end for some ad-libbing on the art of learning the clarinet. I fully expect to hear more good things soon.

www.myspace.com/thehoborchestra

www.b3nson.net

SUCKS TO LALA LAND – Cure For The Common Cold

To throw up a Bob Dylan comparison in the first sentence of this write-up would be an unfairly heavy load to heap upon Sucks To LaLa Land’s Keith Crain, but it’s regrettably unavoidable. For a start like the freewheelin’ songsmith of old, Keith’s a young troubadour, perhaps still learning his trade, with songs stripped right back to the bare bones of a beautiful voice and a finger-picking guitar. In a simple twist of fate Sucks To LaLa Land’s fondness for churning out exciting Dylan covers in recent months hasn’t gone unnoticed, but here we’re treated to something original, and like a young painter under the watchful tutalage of an old master, it would appear that the influence is rubbing off nicely. With a song like this, the potential combination of one (if not the) best vocalist to have ever graced the DG compilations, and a maturing mind conjuring up Dylanesque song-adventures is truly an ear-watering prospect. So stay tuned.

www.myspace.com/suckstolalaland

DEAD CANARIES – Who Knew?

Like some musical superhero the addition of real live drums is the equivalent of bestowing special powers through some magic potion on the Dead Canaries set-up. Men, women, children, and especially animals openly wept with equal measures of joy and confusion at the beauty and ingenuity of this year’s relatively drum-free “Crital Mass” album – so one can only speculate as to the aftershock of their next offering if “Who Knew?” is anything to go by. Melodically riotous, unanticipatedly noisy, catchy and effortlessly cool like some nodback to the 1960s Mod-era, this song is arguably one of the finest 3 minutes to have been born from the bowels of the Dead Canaries laboratory to date. With rumours of a new album sometime soon you should expect more of the unexpected – and let’s face it, you wouldn’t expect anything less from this band would you?

www.myspace.com/deadcanaries

www.cozyhomerecords.com

Download DEAD CANARIES “Critical Mass” at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

THE PLAYGROUND – Songs For Jennifer

I feel sorry for the flies in Mixmastermigity’s home “studio” because there really can’t be anywhere safe for them to land. Picture a circus world of kazoos and guitars, of handclaps and gadgets and you’re getting the idea. Where most bands bust a gut flogging a style to trademark perfection, this guy seems determined to rip through every genre going (and have some fun while he’s ripping) – we’ve heard Dylanesque Highway 61 folk, Beatlesque distorted pop, slacker Indie Rock, and now with “Songs For Jennifer” we’ve got a slice of unrepentant electronic soul. Drum patterns and computer layers of sound take the flies to someplace else altogether as they buzz around loved up through a fog of smoke and their own confusion. With a debut Playground album surely going to make a break for cover soon, I can honestly say that I don’t have a clue what comes next. I wouldn’t even write-off some kind of death-metal-hip-hop, I’m just happy to be one of those flies circling in an invisible ring around the big tent roof buzzing on whatever comes next.

www.myspace.com/mixmastermigity

www.cozyhomerecords.com

Download “The Playground” EP at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

INVASIONS – Helpless Magic

The psychedelic capital of the world (Toronto) pulls another great band from it’s seemingly bottomless magician’s hat. Invasions sit comfortably at the edge of the swirling psych vortex, just dipping their toes in and pulling their own pop faces while they’re at it, oblivious as to how special this music actually is. “Helpless Magic” is upbeat and full of swagger, with a melody that sticks like bubblegum to your boots, guitars like uncontrollable dogs licking your face, drums jumping up and down on your back, and a vocal delivery of totally wasted cool. There’s only one thing I can possible say to sum this song up – “It’s magic…”

www.myspace.com/invasionsmusic

THE FALLING FLOORS – If You Say ‘No’

If this had been 1965 instead of 2008 then The Falling Floors would be the kind of band that would have surely had rabid record executives salivating in the wings of their every gig, ready-made contracts rolled up in their sweaty hands. Within a matter of months this Manchester band would have been sitting pretty in the Top 10 alongside now legendary names like The Beatles, The Kinks and Ken Dodd. But as it happens, of course it’s 43 years later and the brilliant “If You Say ‘No’” must be content (for now) to shine prettily on an obscure Indie music mix-tape. But go and listen close enough and you might just be able to hear behind the “ooh-la-la’s” and the gobsmackingly great tune, the sound of young girls sobbing and the pitter patter of saliva at the edge of the stage.

www.myspace.com/thefallingfloors

SAUVIE ISLAND MOON ROCKET FACTORY – Another Suicidal Continental Sled

I think I fell in love with this song instantaneously. Once I’d gotten over the mouthful of a band name and song title, there was something charged and highly original in the structured chaos of the music, the psychedelic slide riff, chugging bendy electric chords, walking bassline, and schizoid jazz drums, but the more I listened the more I found that it was actually the song itself that elevated it to the creamy head of great tunes in my musically saturated mind. “Another Suicidal Continental Sled” is the kind of song that songwriters dream of writing, something that could probably be framed by any combination of instruments and still come out sounding like one of the best things you will hear this year. If anybody can figure out if and where I can get my hands on an acoustic version then feel free to let me know. As well as being a favourite of Sauvie Island live shows, I’m told that this song was also a favourite of a friend of the band who tragically took her own life. So I guess regrettably this one’s for her.

www.myspace.com/sauvieislandmoonrocketfactory

JANE GILMORE – Where’d You Go, Mr. Sunnyside? (demo)

It’s not a great secret how highly I rate Jane Gilmore as a singer/songwriter, and in many ways she epitomises what the Daydream Generation is all about. Where some bands have the luxury of recording studios to play in, and some home-recording artists have top quality technology at their fingertips to bring their songs to life, there are others who are simply content (or forced) to make do with what they’ve got, grab a guitar, press record, and sing for the sake of songwriting. A track like this might still only be at the demo stage, but it goes on to tick every box a lo-fi gem should – highly autiobiographical, alive with brilliant phrases & melodies, gutsy and beautifully raw. Jane Gilmore yet again delivers a masterclass on how to be yourself by dreaming of dancing in forests and baking in the Midwest. On the stage of a daydream it’s not where it’s going, but where it’s at that really matters.

www.myspace.com/janegilmore

Download JANE GILMORE “Knowledge Is Dangerous” at the Quixodelic Record store above.

WILD SMILE – Technicolor Breeze

Let’s face it – anyone who has the tehnical know-how to build a song around a Beach Boys surfing drumbeat like that knows exactly what they are doing. Casey Hardmeyer (Wild Smile) serves up “Technicolor Breeze” on a bed of harmonies, a song for the summer of youth, full of twee hippy keys, a gentle voice that verges on shoegaze, and of course those drums. At worst it’s easy listening loaded with innocent cool, at best it’s two and a half minutes of unmined pop psychedelia like a super-colourful pale wind on your happy upturned face.

www.myspace.com/caseyhardmeyer

TWISTED GIMLET – Far Far Far (You Are Invincible Now)

“Far Far Far…” begins life as a trippy spiritual lullaby concerning the benefits of sleep with a solitary solarized vocal in the dark above a distant swirling organ. In itself that would have been great enough, but halfway through the song explodes into a funky 60s rhythm section that ushers the song to a higher level still, the dreamlike intimacy of it’s beginnings melting away like a series of colours down the barrel of a kaleidoscope. Throw in a fucked up band name and if the spark of curiosity is not a full-blown inferno between your ears then I can only assume we must be listening to different songs. Soon as the heat from this track cools down I’ll be tracking the scorched earth back to its origins and demanding to know what other weird concoctions Twisted Gimlet has been cooking up.

www.myspace.com/twistedgimlet

ONE UNIQUE SIGNAL – Dismemberment

There’s always one song on every Daydream compilation I find myself crossing my fingers for, hoping you can hear what I can hear. One Unique Signal sit unflinching at the darkest end of shoegaze/psychedelia, very nearly toppling over into something resembling an experimental effects driven punk-rock-noise project. “Dismemberment” taken from the brilliant 3-song EP of the same name is full-throttle from the moment the key hits the ignition. Noisy, layered, menacing, magical, the sound of kicking through things in a frenzy of feedback and you know what – why the fuck am I crossing my fingers? This song and this band are brilliant.

www.myspace.com/oneuniquesignal

BECKY N – Rest

And so the unthinkable very nearly happened. Since July 2007 whenever the compilation rallying call has been sounded, Becky N has been there on the front line with her clever guitar lines, kooky accordian, microphone tied to hair and poetry flowing. And with DG6 I was made up to hear from her again, this time with “a disco song” called “Yellow Days”, and as always the song was subtly brilliant. Only with a couple of weeks to go she changed her mind, said the song was rubbish and forced me at ten and a half thousand mile gunpoint to remove it from the compilation. Thankfully on the very last day I was looking for songs, she produced “Rest”, and thankfully again it’s what she does best – picks up a guitar and sings more melodic fodder for a growing army of admirers.

www.myspace.com/beckynnnn

Download BECKY N “Two Wheels” EP at the Quixodelic Record link above

THE GILLS – Ghosting

Having graced DG5 with the brilliant “To How We Feel Down”, here’s another of Ryan from Sleep School’s musical projects. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear the record that “Ghosting” was taken from – an 8-song record, dark, melodic and majestic called “Engine Note”, and was given the priviledge of hand-picking my favourite track from it for this compilation. After 3 weeks of listening to the record and changing my mind a dozen times over, I eventually picked the immaculate “Ghosting”, revved-up comparison-defying shoegaze-pop with fire in it’s bones, as atmospheric as it is accessible, as full of feedback as it is melody. Another couple of days though and I may have just changed my mind again, “Engine Note” is that good.

www.myspace.com/thegillsthegills

SIMON PILER – Big Arc Blues

The main question about Simon Piler is “artist or musician”? The answer is probably a lot of both. I might have been dreaming again, but I’m pretty convinced that the email that accompanied this song described how it was made “with bicycle parts”. How this is possible, or even if it is true, I honestly don’t know. I’ve listened for bells and a foot pump, but I really can’t hear much further than the bluesy-folk ferocity of it’s vocal line. There’s no doubt though that “Big Arc Blues” sounds nothing like anything I’ve ever heard before – rather than other-wordly, it’s so weirdly great that it can only be human and very much of the earth, mechanical, functionally expressive, and as curiously unconventional as music can get.

www.myspace.com/simonpiler

BROKEN MONO – Now The Sun Is Golden

Sometimes I think the man with a cat’s head and an ear for 60s psychedelic guitar riffs is just playing with my mind. He says about this song “oh, and this one’s got a riff on it”. A riff? This resembles quite possibly one of the greatest understatements of the century – “Now The Sun Is Golden” doesn’t just start with a riff, it snarls into being with a loping electric gathering of rain clouds, chords and notes that would have been worthy of Jimi blasting the skies wide open. “Now The Sun Is Golden” is Broken Mono at his finest, psychedelic, supersonic, call it what you want. They say that when Hendrix was born the moon was blood red, and when Broken Mono was born “absolutely nothing happened”… well I think maybe it’s happening now.

www.myspace.com/brokenmono

VAGABOND STORIES – Dressed In Dreams

All the way from Germany, another lesson in how to craft a perfect psychedelic shoegaze sound. Bittersweet beautiful vocals wrapped around a Brian Jonestown Massacre-esque arrangement, and the very best thing about this song is that it is still only at the “rough-mix” stage. Lord only knows how great it’s going to sound when it’s finished. Vagabond Stories promises loads and I’m sure will be a name you’ll be seeing over and over again in future months, in the meantime I’m feeling rather pleased with myself that we managed to squeeze them onboard the Daydream bus at the very last moment – the compilation is darker and more shimmering with their presence.

www.myspace.com/vagabondstories

THE BAREFOOT KID – Waiting For

Some songs are so laid-back that you feel like you should be tilting your head horizontally to hear them properly. It’s partly that wicked little slide guitar line that punctuates The Barefoot Kid’s “Waiting For”, like some odd rowing boat bobbing up and down upon the sea of acoustic sound. But it’s equally as much to do with the vocal take, a barely audible drawl, the murmur of a daydream waiting for something to happen. All you can really do when faced with a song like this, is to lie back, close your eyes and let the ocean take you wherever it wants to go. And you’re certain somewhere deep down in your brain that if you were to peek over the side then you’d surely find the name “Syd” inscribed in spidery psychedelics on it’s odd bobbing side.

www.myspace.com/vileandthevain

KALEIDONAUTS – Let’s Start A Country

There must be some kind of unwritten rule somewhere out there concerning writing a review of a song you’ve been involved in, so for once I’m not going to say why it ended up on the compilation instead I’ll stick to the cold hard facts. “Let’s Start A Country” is from the second Kaleidonaut’s album “Tigermouse” released not so long ago through our very own Quixodelic Records. Originally written by me, it was re-worked and re-drafted by Warchalking, and finally was given a touch of vocal sophistication by Jane Gimore. I think what it’s about is pretty self-explanatory.

www.myspace.com/kaleidonauts

Download KALEIDONAUTS “Spaniard” and “Tigermouse” at the Quixodelic Record store above.

THE SUGAR SKULLS – She’s Supernatural

The Sugar Skulls are pretty special for a whole range of reasons. For a start the two artists who make up the ranks are geographically poles apart, Mexico and Glasgow to be precise – the fact their combined sound strikes a note of such eerie harmony just goes to show that it’s not where you’re from, it’s how you feel that matters more and more these days. Individually, Celina O and Al Hotchkiss are pretty damn amazing at doing what they do best – Celina with her own brand of truthfully sweet and profound beat poetry, Al with his unnerving ability to craft desert-drenched psychedelic vistas of hallucinogenic guitar cool. Put the two together and you get truly brilliant tracks like “She’s Supernatural” (which incidentally I picked because it shows a whole other side to the combination than “Is This Your Vehicle?” as show-cased on DG5).

www.myspace.com/theesugarskulls

www.myspace.com/yourpsychtunes

UBERFUZZ – As If It Matters

“As If It Matters” is the title track from the most recent EP from planet Uberfuzz. If you rake around on the site you should be able to find a full review of the record – or better still you can advance straight to GO and go download the entire EP for free from our Quixodelic Record store. This track’s arguably the most immediately accessible of the 5 songs, a rolling, pop-rock-psych fusion of ideas, strobe lights blinking in the background. Part-Spacemen 3, part-Velvet Underground, and many parts something you probably haven’t heard anywhere else before, it all sounds like these guys can make songs like this in their sleep. Long may that continue.

www.myspace.com/uberfuz2

Download UBERFUZZ “As If It Matters” EP at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

Disc Two

THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS – Postcard Crimes

So if you haven’t yet checked out Toronto’s The Space Between Things then now’s your chance. I can’t understate how amazing this guy’s music is – for months I’ve been tuned in as he breathes out song after song on his MySpace player, and to date I’m yet to hear anything disappointing. “Postcard Crimes”, like “Bare Hands” on DG5 is an absolute work of genius, psychedelically perfect, abstract, beautifully produced and as catchy as a winter bug. I mean for weeks I was singing this tune involuntarily in my head, never quite hitting those brilliant notes. As a curious aside for Indie music geeks, I figure it’s worthwhile mentioning that this track also features The Invisible Mouth on bass – so if ever there was a collaboration that was bound to work then this was it. And man did it work.

www.myspace.com/thespacebetweenthings

ROCKETSHIPS OF LOVE – Why Couldn’t I See?

Daydream Generation 6 should probably go down in history as “The Paul Le Keux” compilation because it’s got this guy written all over it. Rocketships of Love is the mastermind behind Uberfuzz’s pet side-project, highly experimental, predominantly cover-versions, and rooted in whatever sounds he can get out of a synthesizer, I always heard this music as a way to let off steam and cut loose and see what was possible (in contrast to the Uberfuzz ethic of creating as close to near perfect space-age-psychedelics). Originally we were going to go for the infectious instrumental “Stylophone” from the Rocketships debut album, but after hearing the record for once I put my foot down about using a particular song. A Spacemen 3 cover version, it’s more like an explosion of technicolour sound, the perfect symmentry of the cool boy/girl vocals, the volleys of feedback, and the whole thing elevating your brain to places you’re usually only lucky enough to dream about. Side-project it might be, but fucking amazing it most definitely is.

www.myspace.com/rocketshipsoflove

THE LUCID DREAM – The Twilight End

At the risk of alienating a whole compilation of egos (though I try my very best to avoid involving anyone like that and fingers crossed we’re ego-less again) I’m going to come right out and say that The Lucid Dream are the most exciting band we’ve got on these two discs. By exciting I don’t just mean the music, but also the potential impact that they might have on the future of music. A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a handful of songs from this Carlisle psych-outfit that blew me away, where dirty Iggy-style fucked up rock & roll walked hand in hand with shoegaze brilliance such as we’ve got here with “The Twilight End”. It’s been a long time since I heard anything as immense and atmospheric as the early Verve singles – but I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that this even surpasses that. For a few years people have been talking about the UK psych-scene breaking into the mainstream, and finally perhaps here is a band who have got all the credentials (and the songs) to tip it over the edge.

www.myspace.com/theluciddream08

THE LOADED WHISPERS – Easily Loved/Easily Hated

Another gem from seemingly nowhere. Stephanie Lane and Jermiah Jones are Dublin’s The Loaded Whispers, a collaboration soaked in poetry and lushly dense psychedelic soul sounds. The brilliant “Easily Loved/Easily Hated” is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg, with hints of The Brian Jonestown Massacre or Mazzy Star, but at the same time wonderfully unique and straight to the point – don’t just take my word for it, go follow the crumbs back to their MySpace page and band website where you can download a load of mp3s for your listening pleasure. That’ll be one of my very first stops when I finally get this compilation out from under my feet… a dose of The Loaded Whispers to counteract potential future winter blues. Ahhh.

www.myspace.com/theloadedwhispers

WILLIAM CARPENTER – Grey Dawn

From the forthcoming album “William Carpenter Sings”, “Grey Dawn” is just another example of how great a songwriter this guy undoubtedly is. There’s something about people who are able to write timeless songs – either you can do it with ease, or you can spend your whole life trying (and failing). William Carpenter falls guitar in hand into the sparsely populated former category, folky philosphical tunes with catchy melodies, everything sounds original and yet so familiar that you can’t help but dig it immensely. This Christmas I’m simply putting “William Carpenter records” on my list – the drums can wait, my clothes can be holey for a few more months, and I’ll gladly sacrifice the idea of a digital camera in favour of an extended play of this music if the melancholy glimmer of “Grey Dawn” is anything to go by.

www.myspace.com/williamcarpenter

THE REVOLUTIONARY PATRIOTS – Lights and Drums

Sometime during DG5 I got sent this song by L.A’s The Revolutionary Patriots and thought it was great. So great in fact that I promptly visited their MySpace page and stumbled over the genius acoustic howl of “Glass Daughter”. I must have listened to those two songs back to back for over an hour trying to figure out which I liked the best and eventually had to refer it to a third party (Mrs Smally). She prefered “Glass Daughter”, messages were sent, and thus “Lights and Drums” lay dormant in my inbox for several months. From the moment I got it into my head to do a 6th compilation I had this song in mind for inclusion. A frantic flurry of emails in the days prior to the compilation going out and at the 11th hour I got an ok from the band to use it, but that they had some new songs they were recording and wanted to go back and redo this one. By this point we’d circled way past the 12th hour into something resembling pure panic. Whereas “Glass Daughter” was an instant hit in the musical mainline vein, “Lights and Drums” had been a slow burner ascending to an almost unbearable addiction of ritually playing it last thing before my bed every night over a 2-week period. It’s a song that will stick with me for life, and even more frightening when I later heard the quality of the newly recorded songs. The moral of the story I suppose is: approach this band with caution as music doesn’t come labelled with health warnings and addiction is highly possible – Dr. Smally.

www.myspace.com/therevolutionarypatriots

JAMES REDMOND – History

There are of course many sides to the music of James Redmond – pop comedy, psychedelic experimentalism, ska racket-making, sci-fi spoofs, motown lampoon… I could keep on going… but I think this here is the side of his music I dig the most. “History” is all about the song, bristling with Liverpudlian melodic charm, so great that you barely even notice that it’s simply a guy and his guitar home-recorded for fun. It would have been a complete travesty if this song had been left to fade away on a cassette at the bottom of some drawer somewhere (which by the sounds of it, it very nearly did), so it’s with equal amounts of relief and pure listening pleasure that we’re proudly featuring it on the compilation. Makes you wonder what other magic might just fade away in that drawer doesn’t it?

www.myspace.com/dirtyticketband

Download JAY REDMOND “Too Much To Think” at the Quixodelic Records store link above.

LOVE KNOT – Tonight You Belong To Me

Sometimes bands get involved in these compilations through random bulletins I post looking for kindred daydreamers who want to get involved, sometimes we feature people we already know who are making great music, but sometimes someone gets involved and I can’t even remember how it happened. A year and a half ago we featured a song by Indian Givers called “Until We Have Faces” that was quite possibly one of the most kookily amazing things I heard in all of 2007. One half of these  (Ricky) later contributed to DG3 with a cover of “What A Wonderful World”, and now the other half (Rebecca) is back with a cover of “Tonight You Belong To Me” (does anyone know who wrote the original because I for one don’t have a clue). And once again its one of the most kookily amazing things I’ve heard again all year, lo-fi folk-pop brilliance and a voice that hits heavenly notes “just for fun”. Amazing eh?

www.myspace.com/lovetheknot

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION) – Pinky’s Valentine

Well a DG compilation wouldn’t be a DG compilation without Bobby Rogan on board would it? As always, “Pinky’s Valentine” sounds typically Figs – crashing drums and guitars, spikey vocals and harmonies, and a killer melody that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The track itself was written by and features one of the Cozy Home’s most talented individuals (Jenny Penny) as well as backing vocals from Electric City Subway’s maverick frontman Pete, and together the three create a shambolically loveable rogue of a take on it. You can download for free records by all of the above at www.cozyhomerecords.com - well worth a visit and your listening time, however biased I might be.

www.myspace.com/figmints

Download FIG MINTS”The Passionate Misunderstanding”  at the Quixodelic Record store above.

CODY HIGH SCHOOL – Sunshine, Girls, and Drugs

Well if this is anything to go by, then be prepared to be blown away by the new CoDY High School record that rumour has it is in its final stages of being put together. You would have thought that after the intensely admirable musical free for all that was “Baddest Fastest” that this band would have been taking some kind of extended vacation from the rock & roll lifestyle their songs capture so well… but the truth is far from it. Gil De Ray and friends go back to doing what they do best (in fact they somehow manage to go back and do it even better) with the genius “Sunshine, Girls, and Drugs”. Rarely has guitar wizardy sounded so necessary, as the track goes off like a fire-cracker in your hands, and there’s an electronic feel behind the Stones-style rock & roll frenzy that even seems to add to the depth of the CoDY High School sound. Bring on that new record.

www.myspace.com/codyhighschool

Download CODY HIGH SCHOOL “Baddest Fastest” at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

RIOT OF THE CENTURY – You’ve Given Me Something I Can’t Give Back

Manchester’s Riot Of The Century are surely destined for bigger and better things. Their sound falls somewhere in the vicinity of 21st century indie rock & roll, full of youthful enthusiasm and swagger, each component of their 3-man set-up working in perfect tandem to produce something loaded with energy and style. You can easily imagine how songs like “You’ve Given Me Something…” could potentially go down a storm in a live-set up, and equally should it ever be recorded in a full studio, because somehow you sense that the galloping hookfest crescendo of this track deserves the kitchen sink of production toys to be thrown at it. Describing themselves on MySpace as sounding like “beardless indie”, I’d not be at all surprised to see their name splashed across the music papers someday.

www.myspace.com/riotofthecentury

WARCHALKING – Steady The Hand

I had to work to get this song on here. The heady days of Warchalking’s second album “Stratum”, and the birth of Quixodelic Records seems a long long time ago. But in actual fact, this track and that record are only 6 months old and we’ve packed so much into the last half year that perception of distance in this instance is askew. “Steady The Hand” has never been too far from my most played list on my iPod since he finished that record, with it’s menacing, yet harmonious acoustic underbelly and the explosive vocal fanfare of its chorus (“steady the hand boy it’s gonna get worse for you…”). So in the off-chance that there are late-comers to this particular adventure I figured it would be a useful sign-post to you to go and download that album for free at the Quixodelic Record store., and a reminder about how inspiring that record was and still is.

www.myspace.com/warchalking

Download WARCHALKING “Stratum” at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

THE REAL BURNOUTS – Listen Inside

I think you either get The Real Burnouts or you don’t. It’s the only logical explanation I can come up with to explain why they’re not one of the biggest bands in the world. Let me just explain to you what I “get” from their music – for a start there’s the fact that there’s nothing else out there quite like it, Paul Burnout takes a unique look at the world through his magic glasses and translates what he sees back to the rest of us. Sometimes it is uncomfortably great listening, sometimes it is pure psych gold, almost always it is spontaneously unpredictable, and sometimes still he beams back a song like “Listen Inside”. Beneath a lo-fi acoustic shell there sleeps a monster of an idea where words stick out of the void like arrows and the lullaby evaporates into an epiphany of understanding . You can take the slow train of multiple effects, the fast train of a genius melody, or else you can hitch a lift on the back of beautifully weird bands like  The Real Burnouts.  The destination is the same, it’s just that it’s up to you how you get there…

www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

www.cozyhomerecords.com

THE GREAT VALLEY – Ugly Animals

I’ll be honest, not many bands and not many songs leave me feeling like Dylan’s Mr. Jones, but The Great Valley and “Ugly Animals” are one of those bands, and one of those songs. Can it be possible that there could exist within the same timeframe and running parallel to each other a feeling of something so right happening, expressive, ambitious and entertaining, and a feeling that something is horribly wrong, like a figure at Halloween who somehow looks just too real. Diamond Mouse and The Big Dipper make music from Kennedy’s Garage (if such a place exists) – think Twin Peaks with even more exotic drugs and a ferocious appetite for sucking every last possibility out of limited technology. I don’t know what’s happening here, but fucking hell I like it.

www.myspace.com/kennedysgreatvalley

www.kennedysgaragemusic.com

MOTHERBIRD – June

As much as I love my folk-pop, shoegaze-psych, and lo-fi poetry, there’s always a part of me that looks forward to the weird “other” sections on the DG compilations. And at the heart of this alternative experimental and chaotic universe you’re pretty certain to find the Motherbird of weirdness, flying barely visible through the fog of bewildering minutes. That such bewitching and calustrophobically unusual songsmithery can come from someone who to speak to is above all else very fucking funny, makes it even more extraordinary. “June” is another example of something from the black motionless ocean of the unconscious brain, poetic fragments and jagged guitar structures crissing and crossing like two threads of a web being spun in your eardrums. You’ll struggle to find anything more coherently weird than that.

www.myspace.com/tanjavu

GHODBANE – K.E.T Fear

We’re talking Ketamine and not Key English Tests right? Return to the underground universe of Ghodbane, sounds from the edge of civilisation. For a moment before I first listened to this I experienced a wave of trepidation, no doubt owing to the author describing this track as some “serious oddness”. But when it played I actually experienced an almost contrary sense of alert calm, the multitude of noises and effects lapping at my head like waves of colour. Ghodbane himself refuses to divulge the instruments and non-instruments that he got these sounds from, and actually for that I’m glad. To me, this is how it must sound out beyond the periphery where we abandon not just our own sense of comprehension, but also our trumpets, and guitars, and pianos, and voices.

www.myspace.com/ghodbane

www.myspace.com/splendidisolationpodcast

ROLLERCOASTER – Put Your Faith Back Together With Mine (Ubercoaster Sessions)

There are several bands/artists who haven’t missed a single DG compilation from the first time they contribute, but there are only 5 individuals who have contributed to every compilation from Volume One, and Rollercoaster’s Helter Skelter is one of them. It’s easy to take Rollercoaster songs for granted – you know they’re going to be great before you hear them, you know they’re going to be part-psychedelic, part-gospel, part sound-exploration, and you know that you’re going to be carrying the tune around in your head for days after you hear it. But consistency can be a wonderful thing – where some bands spray songs wildly like bullets from a machine gun hitting targets they never even knew were there and completely missing others, Rollercoaster is something of a psychedelic sharpshooter. He knows what works, and you know what works, and needless to say “Put Your Faith Back Together” with it’s ascending platforms of sound from the tremelo bottom to the soulful top hits the mark first time and every time you hear it thereafter.

www.myspace.com/rollercoasteruk

Download ROLLERCOASTER “From Darkness To Light” at the Quixodelic Record store link above

THE GROSVENOR SUITE – Too Good To Be True

This song first appeared on the DG radar as the closing track of Uberfuzz’s “As If It Matters” EP, but with a little bit of hindsight it quickly became apparent that this song was a whole lot more than it was intended to be – in fact it quite possibly could be the beginnings of a psychedelic supergroup. When I first wrote a review of “Too Good To Be True” I described it as “Arthur Lee’s Love walking in on the Screamadelica sessions”, and it still sounds pretty much exactly like that a month down the line. The individual components are Scott White of Elfwoodprattali and Tin-Town (vox/guitar), Milky White of Regal 360 master sound technician (bass/programming), Kelly Le Keux the sometimes amazing voice of Uberfuzz and Rocketships of Love (synth/vox), and of course Paul Le Keux of Daydream Generation 6 (haha) (no doubt has a hand in pretty much everything). And all I can say is please let this be the start of something as special as its beginning, all the ingredients are there and space is the very least of its limits.

www.myspace.com/thegrosvenorsuite

DANIEL LAND AND THE MODERN PAINTERS – Within The Boundaries

For a change here’s a band name you might be familiar with even if you’re new to the Daydream Generation compilations. Normally I’m 100% behind the unsigned, bizarrely unchampioned and relatively unheard, but if you can’t break the pattern for something this special every once in a while round here then where can you break the pattern? Championed by Sonic Cathedral and Northern Star Records, lauded by the NME and the Guardian alike, I sort of feel like I don’t even need to be saying anything about why you should listen to this. Oh fuck it, I’ll say it anyway. When I was 17 there were bands like Slowdive and Chapterhouse and Ride and My Bloody Valentine that made music like nothing before – ethereal, elegant, cool, intelligent, layered and experimental. 15 years later and nobody really seems to be making music like that anymore – or at least not with the same natural ease. Daniel Land and The Modern Painters would seem to be the exception to this pattern – “Within The Boundaries” begins like the sonic waves of early Slowdive before 30 seconds of bewitching, incredible singing kicks in and blows your mind. There, that should do it.

www.myspace.com/danielland

ALLAN DOUGLAS AND THE TRAGEDIES – Riverside

So I really hope you made it this far through what is undoubtedly a jungle of compilation, because we saved something really special for the very end. I once wrote that “Riverside” on it’s own was worth the price of Allan Douglas’ “Lipstick Pickup” – and though not strictly true as that’s one record packed with diggable goodness – it’s still true that this song sticks out like a solitary star in a sky of possibility. Beatlesque in it’s orchestral ambition, Beach Boys-esque in the complexity of it’s harmonies, “Riverside” is a giant epitaph of a song, profound, full of poetry and fire, hauntingly beautiful, kaleidoscopically intricate, and a burning example of the heights that this songwriter and this band are capable of scaling. It’s an absolute honour to spin a track like this on one of our humble compilations – I honestly can’t give it any more kudos than that.

www.myspace.com/allandouglas

WHAT?

DG6 – as you might deduce from it’s title – is our 6th compilation that we’ve put together since March 2007. Many times I’ve found myself saying “whatever the fuck it is we’re doing”, but I think I might have finally figured it out. On a very basic level what we’re doing is stumbling around trying to find great new music, and in turn provide a platform for mostly unsigned bands to be heard. Most of these will not be household names or the product of fashion, many will be self-recorded or essentially lo-fi by nature, and some will have mastered home-recording to such an extent that they will be as far from lo-fi as you can possibly imagine. In essence what these compilations will do is create a sampler, an alternative soundtrack, a modern-day mix-tape of sounds and songs that you’ll struggle to find in the same place anywhere else. And the compilations with be genre-less – you’ll find folk and psych sitting side-by-side, along with experimental electronic instrumentals, shoegaze anthems, simple acoustic pop, indie-rock, and so and so on. Like my Mama says “The Daydream Generation compilations are like a box of chocolates for your ears, and you just never know what you’re going to get”. You might not like it all, but the chances are there will be something in there for you, a song that you can carry around for the rest of your life, a band that you can fall in love with, or simply something new when you’re tired of the radio and the music television channels, or a neverending stream of bulletins on MySpace from musicians desperately fighting for the last droplets of your attention. Sometimes I think this is some kind of revolution in music, decent people coming together free from concepts like money and advertising and t-shirt sales, and celebrating music for what it really means, and at other times I just think it is a bit of fun, something to kill a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon when there’s nothing left to do but listen. So to answer that “What?” I’d say it is a load of ideas rolled into one and rolling on it’s own accord – you can take it or leave it. Personally I think you should take it because there’s some really amazing music for you to discover, but I’m not going to blow our own trumpet for you.

Who?

The 40 bands who make up DG6 have been carefully hand-picked, or sucked in by something resembling fate. If you’ve downloaded any of our previous compilations then you’ll no doubt be familiar with a whole load of them – The Real Burnouts, Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination), Rollercoaster, Dead Canaries, Uberfuzz, Warchalking, Becky N, The Playground, CoDY High School, Jane Gilmore, James Redmond, Allan Douglas and The Tragedies, Broken Mono, Rocketships of Love, and Sucks To LaLa Land have long been friends of the project and supported us along the way with their songs and words of support. Also there are a handful of artists returning from the gargantuan technological frenzy that was DG5 – names like The Space Between Things, The Hoborchestra, William Carpenter, The Revolutionary Patriots, Kaleidonauts, The Sugar Skulls, Ghodbane, and MotherBIRD are back and will hopefully in time become established sounds on the daydream bus. Finally, there is of course a whole new army of songmakers for you to familiarise yourself with – One Unique Signal, The Falling Floors, Twisted Gimlet, Sauvie Island Moon Rocket Factory, Wild Smile, Invasions, The Gills, Vagabond Stories, The Lucid Dream, Daniel Land and The Modern Painters, The Grosvenor Suite, The Loaded Whispers, The Barefoot Kid, Riot of The Century, Love Knot, Simon Piler, and The Great Valley. It’s a mighty fine mixture of new and old, even if I do say so myself.

The reality is that as hard as I work at this with as little time as I’ve got, that the Daydream compilations wouldn’t be possible without the technological and moral support of several individuals and organisations – so here’s where I get the traditional thankyous out of the way. First and foremost thanks to Tim at www.transatmospheric.com who continues to host this strange little adventure we’re having here – if the DG was really a magic bus, then he’s the guy who owns it and paints it and keeps the engine ticking over. A massive thanks also to Kris for sharing the workload & halving the weight of the daydream (more appreciated than you could ever imagine), and to Chris for the cool cover art – I’m guessing tomorrow the question you’re most going to want answered is “What’s the guy in the woods holding in his hand?”. As always a huge brotherly cheers to everyone at www.cozyhomerecords.com – especially Bobby and Paul – who ride the same wavelength on the other side of the Atlantic and are as inspirationally understanding as it gets. And of course thanks to all the bands and people within bands who responded to my messages to get their songs and artwork in on time – Jon, Tim, Nick, Keith, Will, Kenji, Jolan, Cal, Nick, Dave, Casey, Kyle, Mike, Ryan, Gil, Thomas, Noddy, Jay, Becky, Daniel, Paul, Allan, Paul again, Stephanie, Mike, Paul a third time, Antonio, Celina, Helter, Jane, Rebecca, Davyd, Loudon, Vucky, and Peter. Also not forgetting the projects who have helped us along our way, especially Cozy Home Records and the Splendid Isolation podcast laddies. Finally thanks to anyone who is still reading this and goes on to click “download”. Whether you enjoy it or not is irrelevant – its the trying that counts.

WHERE?

Here: 

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e7bd6c08e4cf772fab1eab3e9fa335ca91c7edf5194e2970

AND YES IT’S FREE!!!

WHEN?

Right now.

WHY?

Well this is the one part of the equation I still can’t get my head around. For all I babbled on about the “WHAT?” it somehow still doesn’t make any sense. Just recently it was pointed out that I am the worst entrepreneur in history, the anti-thesis of a Richard Branson. “So how much money do you make from this thing then?” I was asked. 

“Erm, none” I said.

After a round of laughter in my direction and struggling to regain my composure I began to try and somehow justify the unjustifiable, “Music’s about more than money” I said.

“Yes, but what’s in it for you?” I was asked.

All I could think of was how much I loved DG6 and the five compilations that have gone before, the thrill of discovering a new song that sings it’s way into the very essence of your being, the sense of connection you feel when you recognise a little bit of yourself that has always seemed out of place in some other folk’s music, and the magic of at least attempting to create an alternative to the capitalist-media-circus that is the modern music industry. Of course, I didn’t say any of that, I just shrugged my shoulders and smiled. “WHY?” goes very deep, sometimes too deep to really make any sense.

Nonsensically yours in anticipation of you thoroughly digging this latest offering,

Smally

If you’d been paying close attention you may have noticed some of the following happening:

New Releases:

UBERFUZZ “As If It Matters” EP - A review of this cracking 5-track exclusive release from Rugby’s finest sound-adventurers will be on the site just as soon as I can remember which fucking pocket I put the scrap pieces of paper I scribbled my thoughts on. In the meantime look no further than the Quixodelic Records link at the top of this site.

JAMES REDMOND “Too Much To Think” – 8 songs, 18 minutes, something for just about everyone in your family, a love song for your boyfriend, Les Dennis for your Mother, some headbanging ska for Grandad and free football stickers for the kids. There’s really no need for marriage-guidance counselling, or grumbles re S.A.D – just get this little gem down your lugs and the world will seem instantly better.

KALEIDONAUTS “Tigermouse” – Either the most unloved follow-up of all time or else the 200 of you who downloaded this 4000 mile journey into the solarised snapshot of a scootering mouse melody trail are so blown away that you are officially speechless. Love like that makes you wonder why you sit up half the night trying to figure out the great mysteries of the universe.

And the best thing about them all is

They’re fucking free!

Yes free. I know it doesn’t make any sense but that’s just the way things get done around here. Once you subtract the $ and the £ and all the other variations from the equation you find there is actually something quite starkly beautiful about making and listening to music. That’s not to say that I don’t think talented people should get paid for their endeavours, but imagine a street – an imaginary street – and you can hand out your music to anyone who passes through, and maybe, just maybe they dig what you are doing. It’s a fucking rat race out there, so some of us opt out. What does it mean? Why? Well who cares. It’s free. Enjoy it while it lasts I say.

And while you’re there if you put your ear to the road you’ll be able to hear the unmistakable rumble of another Daydream Generation compilation heading your way – DG6 to be exact. The bus is full, the tracks are playing and finding some kind of logical pattern and from where I am its another great little way to kill 160 minutes sometime. Going on how the various artists who have contributed songs have tagged their music you can be expecting a mad old mix of genres ranging from lo-fi to pop, folk to dream, psychedelic to indie rock, electronic to shoegaze, and blues to folklore whatever that is. You have been warned: it’s a matter of days away now and this is one adventure you don’t want to miss hearing. Or maybe you do. In which case what are you still doing here?

Ok, I’m away to go hunting through pockets again.

More soon enough.

*Postscript:

And so last night the Merlin of this quest to do whatever the fuck it is we’re doing (Tim) created a plug-in that lets me see how many times records have been downloaded from our Quixodelic Store. At first I thought I was simply being a numpty, but after checking and re-checking and re-checking the re-checking it appears that collectively we’re closing in on 3000 downloads (not including the compilations). Now if I’d known that a month and a half ago then the “Factorygate” near fatal meltdown may never have happened. So I just wanted to come back to this post and say CHEERS to everyone who has taken the time to download the records, both for myself and on behalf of all the bands and individuals who have contributed.

This one’s for you: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2582186690

Don’t say we don’t try!  

Another month, another Top 10 for you to feast your ears upon. Congratulations to TELESCOPE VEHICLE for being this month’s most played Daydream Generation mp3, and well done to everyone else who stumbled into some of the most prestigious places on the internet. There are a whole batch of Singles still to be posted from DG5, so watch this space as I’m sure it’ll be all change again next month.

Until then, well just keep doing whatever it is that you like to do.

1 (3) TELESCOPE VEHICLE – The Summer Of The Sea

from DG5

Download audio file (TelescopeVehicle-TheSummerOfTheSea.mp3)


2 (1) THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS – Bare Hands

from DG5

Download audio file (The Space Between Things - Bare Hands.mp3)

3 (New Entry) THE HOA HOA’S – Yellow Jacket

from DG5

Download audio file (Yellow Jacket.mp3)

4 (New Entry) ROUGH GIRAFFE – Scared To Kiss Me

from DG5

Download audio file (Rough Giraffe - Scared To Kiss Me.mp3)

5 (6) JANE GILMORE – Priorities

from DG5

Download audio file (Jane Gilmore - Priorities.mp3)

6 (5) ROLLERCOASTER – Slide It On

from DG1

Download audio file (1-02 Rollercoaster - Slide It On.mp3)

7 (New Entry) TIN-TOWN – Hold You In My Arms

from DG5

Download audio file (Tin-Town - Hold You In My Arms.mp3)

8 (New Entry) FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION) – Like Brownish Skies

from DG2

Download audio file (3-01 Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination) - Like Brownish Skies.mp3)

9 (10) WARCHALKING – Big Dumb American

from DG5

Download audio file (Warchalking-BigDumbAmerican.mp3)

10 (New Entry) BECKY N – Don’t Ask Me Again What I Dreamt

from DG2

Download audio file (3-22 Becky N - Dont Ask Me Again What I Dreamt.mp3)

And so to the traditional half-monthly babble about all things DG related. What’s happening, what’s not happening, what we’re trying to make happen, what’s still not happening, and so and so on.

Firstly thanks again to everyone who has downloaded DG5 since it came out a couple of Sunday’s ago & for all the positive feedback. It’s not going anywhere fast & you can still download it from here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e7bd6c08e4cf772fd5a101cf914073b4d2181f8e396ef6b2

Because of it’s larger than normal size (and audio quality) it’s split into 6 manageable parts which in turn can be burned onto 3 lovable discs. So if you’ve not gotten round to downloading it, you still can – pick a disc at random (they’re all great) and take it from there. If you dig it, come back and dig it some more. There is plenty of new music for you to find, and music may not make the world go round, but it allows it to revolve in a much smoother way. Or something. Oh fuck it. Just download the fucking discs will ya!?

Actually DG5 is not quite finished yet – next couple of days I promise I will shake myself out of the post-comp stupor and get to tidying up everything that needs tidied : the links that are broken on the site, the names that are spelled wrong on the discs and the cover, the fact that 1 of the 3 discs is unmastered and the 3rd is about 80% levelled out (that may take some Herculean willpower to go back and do it all again but it’s for the good of the cause, right?), the cover at the proper size unpixelated will be made available so as you can print it off and your grandchildren will at least know what the fuck it is they’re listening to many years from now (assuming they’ve not all gone back to vinyl, or invented some other kind of crazy device), then there’s the small matter of the remaining Singles to get posted on the site along with reviews and links and lovely pictures that probably need resizing and squaring and… ah.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

So in the midst of all that weirdness & so much needing done, I probably picked an inopportune moment to finally get the DG Forum/Army up and running here:

http://daydreamgeneration.freeforums.org

you can have a look for yourself and see what you think. Help out if you can, ignore it if you want, but just be aware that it’s there and over the following months it’s likely to be the place where ideas get generated & discussed, projects develop, new bands are discovered and so and so on. The main site is here to stay along with this stuff, reviews, news, interviews etc. but over at the Forum you can have your say, you can help guide the ship and take it where you want to go. It may on the surface seem like a dictatorship, but too many hands on the wheel make for nasty accidents – I’ll steer, you give directions and enjoy the ride. That make sense?

As you’ll also be able to see it’s a slow start. It takes a while I guess to build an army & it doesn’t happen in 3 nights, much as I’d like it to. So I’ll keep my chin up & you post something – yes? OK. ;)

And that comrades thank fuck is that.

Oh shit! Actually it’s not quite it. There’s the small matter of this year’s Dreamstream 08 to discuss. Aiming for early November again, I thought it might be an idea to stream a series of pre-recorded podcasts on the day from all over the world, playing songs from the DG projects, from your friends, new stuff, old stuff, just as long as it’s mainly undiscovered stuff. So can anyone out there contribute? And what do you think of that idea?

p.s I’m sure this will be getting discussed at more length on the Forum so if you’re interested then that’s probably where you should head.

AND THAT IS MOST DEFINITELY THAT!

Ha.

OUT TODAY!

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e7bd6c08e4cf772fd5a101cf914073b4d2181f8e396ef6b2

Featuring: Circuit Breaker, The Abberlines, The Real Burnouts, Wino Riot, Allan Douglas & The Tragedies, Fig Mints, Cody High School, Reels, Drum Machine Dating Service, Dead Canaries, Hopeful Monster, Artback Baker, Uberfuzz, My Electric Love Affair, Telescope Vehicle, Strangers, Jerry Kaline, Tofu Delux, Sleep School, Zebra Mu, The Hoborchestra, The Space Between Things,The People, John Ludington, Michael Wookey, Madison Acid, Becky N, William Carpenter’s Family Troubadour, Meghan Geiss, The Revolutionary Patriots, Wisdom Tooth, Nik Rayne, The Sugar Skulls, Ukelilli, Kaleidonauts, Sucks To LaLa Land, Warchalking, The Depravations, The Soft Sunflower, Dylan Gough, Rough Giraffe, Otis Liddy, Ghodbane, Isokon Flats with Uncle Jim, James P. Page, The Red Plastic Buddha, The Orange Drop, The Shivas, Rollercoaster, The Hoa Hoa’s, The Myrrors, The Six Barrels, Cassettes, The Cherry Tree Parade, Bren, Motherbird, Brigadier General, Martians, Tin-Town, Rocketships Of Love, and Jane Gilmore.

Q. How many daydreamers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. As many as we can get around the bulb baby.

I’m starting to lose count of the number of times I’ve kicked off a post with the words “So here we go again”. But, erm, here we go again. Daydream Generation 5 – even by our own quantifiable standards its a monster of a compilation – a three headed quixodelic monster breathing melodic fire to be precise. 62 bands/artists, 4 action-packed hours of music, an alternative soundtrack for your summer and hopefully at the very least, a handfull of songs for you love for every summer of your life to come. It’s reached a stage now where I’m getting uncomfortable using the words “undiscovered music” – for a start each contributor is no doubt well discovered in their own circles, but moreover if you’ve been tuned in to the DG for the last 16 months then you’ll already be familiar with at least half of the names. But as always there is much that is new (and naturally well worth checking out) to show that the mining skills are still as accidentally honed as ever, and there are several old friends from previous compilations that have been warmly welcomed back into the collective king-sized bed. You’ll forgive me this time around if I don’t do the traditional list of exact names, it was a lengthy enough excorcize at 2 discs, but with 3 to get through the day is short and seconds are precious. You’d only be skim-reading it anyway. As you probably are this.

DG5 hasn’t been without its inevitable hitches, but what do you expect with a daydreamer at the wheel? They said about Kerouac that he acted like “once it was dreamt up, it was as good as done…” Dreaming up stuff like “I know, let’s make a mix-tape of mostly unsigned bands” is the easy part. Getting down to orchestrating it is a steep learning curve everytime with just enough knocks and bruises to want to do it again. After DG3 I tried to be clever and cut the dreaded stress-inducing deadline-day out of the equation, setting up the Singles section, the idea being that when there were enough songs to fill 2 discs, the compilation would be deadlineless and thus done when it was done. It worked well on DG4 and it would have worked again on DG5 if I hadn’t made the near fatal mistake of adding up the total time of all the songs we’d mined incorrectly. I’ve overshot the 80 minutes by a track or two before, but somehow this time I managed to run over by 7 whole songs totalling a terrifying 37 minutes. But just to prove that I really do learn from one project to the next, once I’d climbed out of the initial hole of horror I remembered that previous DG fuck-ups have often produced some positive results, so I said to myself “Fuck it… let there be 3 discs…”. 2 days later and 3 discs there were. And it sounded so fucking good that I was relieved to have fucked it up in the first place. I’ll not bore you with the rest of the gremlins that sees this thing coming out a week later than planned – let’s just say I don’t want to think about “bitrate” again for a long, long time, nor will I trust Windows Media Player to calculate 80 minutes ever again, will make sure the engineer is stocked with Vitamin C before burting out a release date, artwork pedantics, overshooting the songs a second time, overshooting the 100MB limit on Mediafire, spelling mistakes and other assorted obstacles left me feeling for 24 hours like I never wanted to touch one of these projects with a barge-pole from a crouching position behind an iron hedge ever again.

And I might not. I guess it all depends on you. If you dig it then I’ll keep on doing it, but if I don’t see messages flying back and forth across MySpace to say that you loved The So And So’s song, or comments on the DG site, then I’m going to finally reach the logical conclusion that we’re all just pishing in the wind here. The Daydream Generation is not some super-slick corporate record company, nor is it even some financially viable super-cool independent record label fuelled by the oil of money, it is a hand-made Prankster bus that journeys on love & comradeship. So I’ll keep driving, but you folks have got to keep it filled up. Post a blog. Post a bulletin. Tell a friend. Or else it breaks down. In the middle of nowhere. And we don’t even know where we’re going yet.

And so here we go again (again) – the part where I say thankyou to everyone who got on board this time and gave their songs to the cause to get us moving in the first place. First and foremost a massive thanks to Tim who like that bald-headed guy at Glastonbury continues to host the DG and make nearly everything you see technologically possible. Secondly, thanks to Kris who has played the inevitable role of sounding board the last 2 months & did some creative back-slapping whenever I was choking on the making of DG5 (much needed and appreciated man). Cheers as well to the people who psychologically broke me out at various crisis points and did some of the dirty work – Jon (coffee wakes people up, and when people wake up they fall in love), Bobby (“yeah it was really easy putting together the Cozy Home comp” haha), and Loudon (good to have someone in the same time-zone as me typing recommendations bleary-eyed after midnight). Big CHEERS for Joe Bockerstette kindly doing the Pepperland cover for us (let’s start a country). Thanks of course to all the individuals and organisations behind all the music who make and continue to make this possible – Tara, Paul Burnout, Gil De Ray, Scout, Paul Le Keux, Helter Skelter, Dylan, Allan, Jared, Edd, Chris, Tim trumpet, Tim Buddha, Steve, Nik (twice!), Sommer, Tanya, The lovely Hoa Hoa’s, Griffin, Max, Joe & Jonny, Jed, all the Marcs and Marks, Becky NNN, Meghan, Jason, Bill, Kenji, Celina, T, all the Nicks, David & Otis, James, both the Michaels, Moppy Gav and Simon, Madison, Dan, Lil, Keith, Bren, CTP, Spendid Isolation Podcast, Your Psych Tunes, Pigeon Hole Records, Optical Sounds Records, Hijacked Records, World In Sound Records, Transatmospheric.com, and of course the brilliant Cozy Home Records. Ta also to Mrs Smally and Smally Jr for etting me get lost in the music factory from time to time and time again.

Finally cheers to you for reading this, for downloading the compilation, and for listening.

Daydream On.

Smally

Can A Mix Tape Save The World?

Probably not. But if it could, then this beautiful wee monster of a capeless compilation might stand a fighting chance. So if you were thinking about buying some music this week then why not keep your money in your pocket, download the 5th & arguably most exciting Daydream Generation compilation for FREE on Sunday. One flick of the power switch & in approximately 12 clicks you can spend the rest of the day digging some of the brightest new bands kicking around out there in the streets after tea.

Oh I’ll not go on this time. There’s plenty more to be written & I’ll save my typing fingers. Just thought I’d let you all know that the glitch has just about been unglitched, the bus is full & being painted as we speak, and unless there is some miraculous technical fuck up then it’s all go for Sunday.

To quote James Page: “woo-hoo!”

Normal service with a brand new kick-ass, head-melting, heart-warming compilation will resume just as soon as we can figure out what the fuck is going on. There are many morals to this particular story including – Don’t assume an accountant can add up, Think carefully about whether a stoned, drunk man with good ears will necessarily do a straight man with bad ears’ job any more efficiently, and of course Good things come to those who wait.

Keep checking in, DG5 will be available shortly…

Thanks for patiently being patient

Based on complex mathematical formulae that I’m not sure I even understand myself, factoring in concepts such as ratio of plays to exposure of song, and number of hits via fuck only knows which search engines, here is June’s Top 10 most played songs from compilations past and present currenly stored at the DG:

1 (New Entry) THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS - Bare Hands (from DG5)

Download audio file (The Space Between Things - Bare Hands.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/thespacebetweenthings

2 (1) SKIPPER THOMAS - Failed Driver (from DG2)

Download audio file (4-06 Skipper Thomas - Failed Driver.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/skipperthomas

3 (10) TELESCOPE VEHICLE - The Summer Of The Sea (from DG5)

Download audio file (TelescopeVehicle-TheSummerOfTheSea.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/telescopevehicle
 
4 (2) JENNY PENNY - Jaxson Brownfeather (from DG1)



Download audio file (2-05 Jenny Penny - Jackson Brownfeather.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/jennypennyg

5 (4) ROLLERCOASTER - Slide It On (from DG1)


Download audio file (1-02 Rollercoaster - Slide It On.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/rollercoasteruk

6 (New Entry) JANE GILMORE - Priorities (from DG2)

Download audio file (Jane Gilmore - Priorities.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/janegilmore 

7 (New Entry) MARTIANS - Midland (from DG1)

Download audio file (1-03 We Are The Martians - Midland.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/themartiansarewe
 
8 (New Entry) THE PLAYGROUND - Come Out And Play (from DG1)


Download audio file (1-04 The PlaygrounD - Come Out And Play.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/mixmastermigity
9 (New Entry) THE REAL BURNOUTS - Be Right Where You Belong (from DG1)


Download audio file (1-13 The Real Burnouts - Be Right Where You Belong.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

10 (9) WARCHALKING - Big Dumb American (from Singles)

Download audio file (Warchalking-BigDumbAmerican.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/warchalking
 
 
 
 
 
 

Daydream Generation 5

So I finally got round to compiling all the covers from previous Daydream Generation compilations – anyone who wants them can get them from:

http://daydreamgen.googlepages.com/artwork2

or download them in a single zip file from here:

http://www.daydreamgeneration.com/MP3/DGartwork.zip

Another month passed, another month older, and still none the wiser.

So it’s been another action-packed headfuck on planet Daydream. Oh where to start? Well I guess I’ll start at the beginning and take it from there…

The latter half of May and the first half of June have seen us up to our eyeballs in Quixodelic melodies. So intense it was that I even machine-gunned out a whole article concerning the meaning of “Quixodelia”, that probably wanted to say everything and wound up saying nothing much of any consequence at all. What can I say? It’s been a cool few weeks and it got to me. For starters the SINGLES project has kept me going – so many songs and new bands to hear, so many old favourites like psychedelic knights coming over the hill & wading into the battle with greed & anonymity that we’re accidentally fighting here. You’ll forgive me for not painstakingly hand-typing a list of everyone who has featured since I last wrote this, as I’m sure you’re more than capable of clicking the “SINGLES” link at the top of the page if you’re curious.

As always we’ve been working our collective socks off to bring you reviews of undiscovered gems and interviews from the various artists that have contributed to past and present DG projects. In no particular order we’ve covered THE REAL BURNOUTS “Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane”, TOFU DELUX “Bear Claw”, and the self-titled UTICA FLOWER COMPANY record. We’ve also spoken to THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS and later this afternoon I’ll be posting an interview with Helter Skelter of ROLLERCOASTER infamy. It’s well worth waiting for.

All 3 of the records that were reviewed can be downloaded for FREE over at the Cozy Home Record Store – http://www.cozyhomerecords.com – our comrades over at Cozy Home HQ have been losing sleep, snorting hard drugs, and wheeling & dealing while sitting goggle-eyed in front of their computers to bring you just about the entire history of The Cozy Home to the age of mp3 downloads. The perfect soundtrack to accompany a lengthy & haphazard account of Cozy Home history that I wrote on this site. You can find it by simply clicking on the “Cozy Home Records” or “Features” links in the “Categories” section on the right hand side of this page. I did my best to leave no stone unturned and hopefully have made some headway into answering the third most frequently asked question around here. Thanks to everyone who helped out on the writing of that article and for the positive words of encouragement. Expect a Rockumentary this time next year.

Of course there was also the introduction of the monthly TOP TEN - where SKIPPER THOMAS’s “Failed Driver” was rightfully crowned the most played track that we store at www.daydreamgeneration.com. Time permitting we’ll try and make this a regular feature – hopefully give those of you new to this strange little corner of the internet a headstart on getting to know some of the bands we feature here.

But all that was then and this is NOW. And I’ve got some exciting news for you all. Actually the use of the word “exciting” is undoubtedly completely subjective & misleading, so I’ll qualify that by re-saying – AND I’VE PROBABLY GOT SOME EXCITING NEWS FOR YOU ALL… (stoned drumroll).

This Summer we’ll be working our posteriors off to bring you a series of EPs from our favourite bands around the globe. In my mind at least this is going to be The Summer Of The DG EP. Here’s how this idea came about: so we’re on our fifth compilation in just over a year and I noticed that some bands have now contributed as many as 5 songs to the Daydream Generation. These songs are all available for free download on the various compilations at the DOWNLOAD link at the top the site, but I figured as a way of saying thanks for supporting what we’re doing here, that it might be a worthwhile misadventure to tie these songs together on a single free download. I’m pleased to say that the initial feelers have already produced at least 7 out of 7 positive responses, and I’ve barely even begun to go around all the bands & artists who have contributed 4 or more songs (including last year’s Dreamstream festival). For some it will simply be a case of putting the songs from the 5 compilations together, for others we’ll be bringing you unreleased songs, or new stuff from their back catalogues, or a mixture of all three. However it pans out I’m curiously positive that it’ll be musical mayhem of the most beautiful variety. So keep your eye on the DGRECORDS store link…

The first of the EPs will be posted on Sunday hopefully – I’ll not spoil it for you by revealing who it’s going to be, but I will say that it’s fucking brilliant. Like I say, I’ll be working my way around everyone who fits the above criteria in the next few weeks, however I would say that for anyone who doesn’t and has previously contributed to the various projects that I’d be more than happy to consider putting out an EP of yours. You know where to find me: daydreamgen@gmail.com – just give me a shout.

So May might have been a quiet month for Daydream Generation Records, but expect June & July to be busting out of the box with activity. Aside from the EPs we’ve got a couple of full length albums lined up and if these artists are as great as I think they are, then you’re going to need to strap yourself in. More news on them as and when it arises.

FINALLY (deep breath) there is the small matter of DG5 to be discussed. As you’ll no doubt be able to see from the SINGLES, we’re rapidly nearing the latest 2-disc offering of Quixodelia’s finest being finished. This time around no expense will be spared & hopefully it will be levelled out & ready to roar in a matter of days. 2 weeks tops. I’ll do the rounds as and when that happens and will post some bulletins and blogs and whatnot to let you all know. So get your own bulletin fingers ready.

And that as they say, is that.

;)

Smallyom

When I was a kid the Top Ten had a bit of magic about it. When I was a teenager I still kept a corner of my eye on it in case one of the bands I loved managed to smash & grab their way in there. But for a long, long time I’ve not paid it any attention. So this morning I decided to try and recreate some of that magic on here. Every month thanks to the many mp3 search engines out there, the Singles and songs from previous DG compilations get thousands of hits/plays and I thought it would be fun to reflect this in a Top Ten chart and post it every month along with a link to the artist’s website and information re which compilation you can find the song on. So without further ado, here’s the very first Top Ten for you:

1 (New Entry) SKIPPER THOMAS – Failed Driver (from DG2)

Download audio file (4-06 Skipper Thomas - Failed Driver.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/skipperthomas

2 (New Entry) JENNY PENNY – Jaxson Brownfeather (from DG1)

Download audio file (2-05 Jenny Penny - Jackson Brownfeather.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/jennypennyg

3 (New Entry) DUSTY CHARTS – Love Us Like Tomorrow (from DG2)

Download audio file (3-05 Dusty Charts - Love Us Like Tomorrow.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/dustycharts

4 (New Entry) ROLLERCOASTER – Slide It On (from DG1)

Download audio file (1-02 Rollercoaster - Slide It On.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/rollercoasteruk

5 (New Entry) INDIAN GIVERS – Until We Have Faces (from DG1)

Download audio file (1-19 Indian Givers - Until We Have Faces.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/weareindiangivers

6 (New Entry) DYLAN GOUGH – I’ve Got A Uke (from Singles)

Download audio file (DylanGough-IveGotAUke.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/dylangough

7 (New Entry) RIVER SPEAK ENGLISH – Puzzle Piece (from DG2)

Download audio file (4-07 River Speak English - Puzzle Piece.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/riverspeakenglish

8 (New Entry) THE REAL BURNOUTS – Wild Sarasparilla (from DG2)

Download audio file (4-10 The Real Burnouts - Wild Sarsparilla.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

9 (New Entry) WARCHALKING – Big Dumb American (from Singles)

Download audio file (Warchalking-BigDumbAmerican.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/warchalking

10 (New Entry) TELESCOPE VEHICLE – The Summer Of The Sea (from Singles)

Download audio file (TelescopeVehicle-TheSummerOfTheSea.mp3)

http://www.myspace.com/telescopevehicle

…it’s been one of those months. Again. A blizzard of emails, a compilation in the making, old friends resurfacing, new friends vanishing in a fog of smoke, more plates a-spinning than ever before, some a-crashing on the floor…

So to recap (and I write this as much for myself as I do for you just to try and figure out where the fuck we are):

The last month has mostly been about getting songs together for next Daydream Generation compilation (DG5). I’ve sent a dozen or more bulletins and posted more blogs than I’d care to remember asking for bands to contribute. At times I felt like one of those jumped up shitbags on the stock market floor trying to get myself heard over the tidal wave of MySpace time-wasters all bawling about this and that, but I bit the bullet and did it for the good of the cause. If you take the time to have a peek in the SINGLES section at the top of this page you’ll see that we’ve had a great response, and in particular made a lot of new friends who make lovely music – hopefully names like MEGHAN GEISS, THE HOBORCHESTRA, JAMES P. PAGE, MADISON ACID, JERRY KALINE, JOHN LUDLINGTON, WINO RIOT, CIRCUIT BREAKER, TELESCOPE VEHICLE, and OTIS LIDDY, will someday be as familiar to anyone who follows what we’re doing here as the favourite names that have kindly returned to another DG project like FIG MINTS, CODY HIGH SCHOOL, THE SOFT SUNFLOWER, DYLAN GOUGH, ALLAN DOUGLAS, and THE DEPRAVATIONS. On the SINGLES page you’ll find thumbnail reviews, and links to all the contributing artist’s websites. And for those of you who can’t be bothered reading then there are a wide selection of pretty pictures to gaze at for as long as your eyes stay open.

For now the songs are there for your listening pleasure only, but once there are enough to fill 2 free discs of download then we’ll patch them altogether & send them out into the universe kicking & screaming. The way things are going with a new Single being posted every day, and plenty of songs in the daydreamgen@gmail.com traffic jam, our estimated time of arrival in Free Download City is likely to be mid-to-late June. With a mighty tail wind of good-will & switched on daydreamers we have made great time. Expect some sort of turbulance before the trip is over. And help yourself to drugs & drink & whatever religion floats your boat. I’m working on a crash landing manual as we speak but if I don’t get it done in time, then thanks for travelling with the Daydream Generation, sorry we fucked it up.

But of course we won’t fuck it up. Probably.

So keep your submissions rolling in – there’s still a bit of room onboard the next compilation, but the spaces are being filled in a hurry. If you want to submit a track then email an mp3 and single cover/pic to daydreamgen@gmail.com – I can’t guarantee we’ll play your music, or that it will fit with what we’re doing, but I appreciate and dig hearing new sounds – so hit me with your rhythm stick.

Where the fuck was I?

Ah yes – the last month. Beyond the next compilation this site has been not quite a hive of activity, but certainly a busy little oddity shop down a hidden backstreet of the internet. If you’ve got some time to kill then have a read of our recent BROKEN MONO or DYLAN GOUGH interviews, or preferably both, or wrap your eyes around a review of UBERFUZZ’s “Drowning In Honey” album. Once again for those of you who can’t be bothered reading then there’s THE SOFT SUNFLOWER’s video, a cool acoustic performance of “Feelin’ Groovy“. (Although if you are one of those can’t be bothered to readers, then its highly unlikely you’ll have just read that, in which case it was undoubtedly pointless me ever writing it). A note on videos though while I’m here – if anyone who has been involved in any of the compilations want me to post one of your videos on the site then send a link to the usual location.

Is that it?

Is it fuck!

If you really are looking for something to fill the seconds and enrich your head in the process then you could do a lot worse than visiting the dgRECORDS link at the top of this page and download the brilliant new CODY HIGH SCHOOL record “Baddest Fastest“. It’s worth it’s weight in gold that’s for sure, full of baggy guitar hooks, drawled vox and clever words. And thanks to Mr Gil De Ray it’s FREE. Yes FREE. As a bird. No shit.

And that’s it.

I think.

Be happy wherever you are, and if you can’t be happy then try channelling it into some kind of creative project, not only does it work wonders but you might end up contributing something positive to the universe in the process. And if you’re not imaginative enough to be creative, then the chances are that you are either one of those spambots or not even reading this.

Smally

March 2008 will likely go down as defining month in our strange little history. In the space of a few short weeks we managed to negotiate more imaginary hurdles than I’d care to count on my fingers. Statistics grew in the clouds like weird weeds choking the cogs. A record label was born. We played around with viral marketing and built a jukebox at the foot of your bed. Plans were hatched and thrown away like paper balls. Heads pumped air and electricity into the heart of the Cozy Home. We made some new friends and probably lost some old ones. Another compilation crash-landed in your garden. We’re talking the unsustainable growth of an LSD injection, the sort that would have any small company reeling and jetting off to some sunny hideaway to get drunk and spend their winnings. Right now though, its like the aftermath of a big house party round here and my head is well and truly burned out. So throw the dog a bone.

Of course it stumbles on. There’s plenty to be getting on with. The “Singles” project is back in full swing and if you visit the link at the top of the page you’ll hear new songs from the likes of WARCHALKING, HOPEFUL MONSTER, THE SUGAR SKULLS, DEAD CANARIES, KALEIDONAUTS and MEGHAN GEISS. Once I’ve torn myself away from the land of pointless animation and writing stuff like this, I’ll get round to posting a few more, including the much-needed return of FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION) and the brilliant CODY HIGH SCHOOL. There’s a light that’s stuck on green and all you can do is go. And keep going.

Aside from the ”Singles” this is likely to appear to anyone watching from a safe distance like a quiet month. But don’t be fooled – behind the daydream the mechanisms of revolution are in full swing, ideas form and reform daily, and the summer is on this side of the world’s doorstep. Just please keep watching, and more important listening. Do what you can to keep it going, post a blog or a bulletin from your MySpace page, tell a friend to check out what’s going on. Be imaginative about it if you can be bothered. We’ll be keeping the reviews and interviews going, as well as hopefully a couple of very cool features for you to digest and throw up on the doorstep of whatever it is you’re doing. I doubt very much whether we’ll be able to generate the momentum of the last month again anytime soon, but maybe that’s a good thing. Back to roots. Quality over quantity. Sometimes I think something profoundly great is starting to happen here, other times I laugh at how pathetic that sounds. Fuck the tightrope though. Let’s just jump and enjoy the fall.

 And while we’re falling remember and download (FOR FREE) the 3 albums we released:

DEAD CANARIES – Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs Crawling Things

WARCHALKING – Stratum

KALEIDONAUTS – I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard (Mine Died)

You can get these here: http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/?page_id=75

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded these so far & for all the positive feedback. It’s a pretty brave move by the likes of Warchalking and JOTA to give you their music away for the price of a single click and I’m only too aware of how much work went into the making of all 3 records. Whether it really is the future of how we’re going to get hold of new music only time will tell I guess, but these albums may not be free forever, so grab them while you can and feed your head.

Finally (deep breath) I get a lot of emails and messages from people offering to help out or asking what they can do to spread the word. Well how about trying this excorsize: on the right hand side of the site their is a list of bands & artists who have contributed to our various compilations and projects. Each name links onto their MySpace page or website, so how about taking half an hour out of your busy lives and going through them, friend requesting them, leave a message, listen to their songs. It’s a two-way street – if you dig what they’re doing, then there’s every chance that they’re going to dig what you’re doing. That’s how (and probably why) it works.

To be continued…

…obviously.

Here’s a pretty in-depth rambling interview I just did with “Lather Rinse Repeat” fanzine re what The Daydream Generation is all about:

1. For the few who haven’t heard how this whole thing got off the ground, give us a little background on the project.

Oh man, it’s funny but even though the DG has only been travelling for little over a year, the beginnings of it somehow feel like a very long time ago. We’ve packed a whole lot of projects and music into a relatively short space of time and to be honest, things have started to get a little fuzzy. A few months ago I wrote “The Brief And Haphazardly Short Useless History Of The Daydream Generation” and I’m thinking now, in hindsight, that perhaps it might not have been so utterly useless after all. But to the best of my recollections I suppose it all started with Cozy Home Records. We’d just fucked up the overly-ambitious Cardboard Box: The Troof Above Your Head box-set project, so in the void I thought it might have been worthwhile to put together some kind of compilation of all the brilliant bands that can be located over at www.cozyhomerecords.com – a free download promo CD. This was probably January/February 2007. For one reason or another the main characters at Cozy Home HQ thought that potentially it would be difficult to coordinate, so one night while smoking a cigarette in the rain in my back garden and thinking about the Beat Generation I was wondering what kind of Generation we are. And as soon as I thought the words “Daydream Generation” the two ideas collided in a shower of spectral sparks and so I guess technically that was when the project was born. I knew a few bands via MySpace and in real life too so I figured that rather than make it Cozy Home exclusive it might be fun to open it up, maybe try and spread the erm love a bit further. Without ever really considering the full implications of what I was undertaking, I sent a whole load of frantic and perhaps slightly derranged emails out that night asking if anyone was interested. I think I woke up around 3am in a complete panic thinking “Fuck… what have you done?!” If I’d known then what this would become then I probably would have thought “Holy Fuck you stupid fuck, what the fucking fuck have you done?” The rest – as they say – is the rest of the history, which, with an eager nose for breadcrumbs and a trigger happy finger you can trace across the dg website. Failing that you could just download the compilations in reverse order and get some amazing music for FREE.

2a. So it’s been a little over a year since the Daydream Generation started. Are you satisfied with your efforts?

To be really honest I just don’t have the time to stop and feel much satisfaction. It’s like that big stone ball at the beginning of Indiana Jones and right now it’s like we’ve barely begun to budge it. On the flipside to that I don’t think we can necessarily force it to move – any growth has to be organic and may at some times feel somewhat laboured. I’m about 67% certain that a project like this is all about momentum, and I fear that if we take the foot off the gas then the whole thing will come to a shuddering halt. I posted on the last monthly update on the site a quick breakdown of the number of unique visitors who have been dropping in on the dg website since it was first set up, and undoubtedly we’re growing. It may be completely foolish though to measure success of something like this in terms of quantity as opposed to quality – I mean, I am conscious of the fact that as it grows I have a lot more emails to reply to and sometimes it takes me a while to get round to them. Bearing in mind that this whole thing really does exist in some kind of daydream dimension for me and back in the real world I have a young family to love and laugh with, and a full-time job with five 12 hour days a week to not lose – with plate-spinning like that it really is difficult to ever truly be consistently satisfied. If ever there are flashes of feeling like we’re doing a good thing here, it’s when I pause for nanoseconds to consider that maybe we’re providing a not particularly elevated (but elevated nevertheless) platform for musicians and artists and songwriters that doesn’t necessarily exist anywhere else for them, and that they feel the same way I did when my “band” (I use this word very loosely as always) The Wheelies got invited into the Cozy Home collective. If anything, it’s like being at the centre of some emotional oscillator that flickers between excitement and pointlessness. Take this interview for example, on the one hand its like the first time in a year that I’ve stopped to try and capture all of this in words and it’s an interesting excorsize for me, but on the flipside there’s always the nagging underlying doubt whether anybody is even going to read it. Or care for that matter.

3. Are there any goals that you may have set for yourself that have yet to be reached?

On a personal level, stop smoking. I have now officially lost count of how many times I have stopped. And started again. As for the dg, well I don’t think there has ever really been any “goals” – certainly nothing further than a week in advance if you can count stuff that’s “needing done” in the next week or so. As is the way previously shown to us via Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the life of a daydreamer is directed by improvisation and random bouts of whimsy. Essentially it’s essential that we make it up as we go along, that we are never really very sure what the “it” is that we are doing here, but that we’re in “it” together. It’s turbulent and will sooner or later be the death of itself, but I like it that way, ideas superceding each other as and when they are dreamt up, keep “it” on its toes and alive. I think if we ever get bogged down or start going through the motions then we might as well just give it up there and then – the same goes for setting goals. We should just ride “it” while its here and hopefully look back later and laugh. Fuck. I said a lot there although potentially it may have looked like I wasn’t really saying anything at all. So the answer is “no” in terms of any long-term vision (apart from the smoking), but “yes” if we’re talking immediate plans – such as tidy up the website, promote DG4, get DG5 off the ground, post some more reviews, keep the Store fully functioning, and of course get as many people as possible to download the brilliant new Warchalking album (hopefully the first of many and a giant leap for a little “it” like this).

4. There were 42 different acts on the most recent compilation, and quite a few more that have been on previous discs. How does one find all these people?

Fortunately I was asked this very question less than a week ago and I took the time out to breakdown DG4. From the 42 bands/artists on there, 20 were “mined” from MySpace by me digging down deep in the night in search of something to listen to, 8 are Cozy Home artists, 5 were recommended to me by bands who have previously or continue to contribute to the project, 4 offered me songs via daydreamgen@gmail.com, 3 were either directly or indirectly through the Brian Jonestown Massacre music forum, and 2 were other identities of bands or individuals who have previously been involved.

The MySpace “mining” is by far the most challenging. With DG4 I consciously set out to try and get some new people involved and hopefully generate some fresh momentum and perspective through that. It’s long hours, sometimes soul-destroying and very poorly paid surfing page after page of bands looking for sounds and profiles that might fit into what we’re doing, but it’s rewarding when you ask someone to take part and they’re up for helping out, or dig what we’re doing. Hopefully some of the new names will go on to be battle-hardened dg veterans several compilations down the line. Of course, MySpace is a double-edged sword. In an ideal world I’d like for the dg to exist completely independent of the big corporations and thus to live outwith prototypical capitalist business models which have an uncanny ability to distort and skew music from being an end in itself, to some kind of means to financial reward. But such a completely independent existence is regrettably a long way down the line. At the same time I acknowledge completely that thanks to sites like MySpace, there has been a catalytic shift in the music industry and at this present moment in time we are still very much at the beginning of this process. That a kid in the UK can record his songs on a laptop and post mp3s that can be heard on the other side of the world that very same day without the aid of a record company, or distribution mechanisms, or a money-injected turbo advertising initiative is truly an amazing thing. A short while ago I was completely bored with listening to the same music all the time. But I always loved hearing bootleg recordings, the crackle and hiss, the fluffed note, the laughter off mic, the song in progress, probably as much as the heavily produced album versions of songs. Bob Dylan and The Beatles are great examples of this. Discovering this limitless new world of DIY recordings is the best thing that ever happened to my ears. So I’m resigned to MySpace being a necessary evil to keep this thing afloat particularly in regards to recruiting bands and promoting what we’re doing, but in some idealized world it would be great to get by without it. Fuck, is that a goal? No, its just a daydream. Either way, as a certified daydreamer I reserve the right to contradict myself repeatedly depending on whatever is happening in my head at any given moment5. Has anyone ever come to you, or is recruitment all done by solicitation?Well as you can see from the figures, we don’t really get that many requests from bands. But I’m glad you brought this point up. The few bands who do get in touch are generally great, but I’d love to hear from more people. I think sometimes all it takes is that little bit of self-confidence to come and approach a project like this and ask to be involved, but I’m pretty convinced that not every great musician or songwriter is necessarily the most confident person. I know on a personal level that it would take a lot for me to approach another organisation asking them to play one of my songs, and the thought that there might be someone sitting there with great music unsure about hitting the send button or not knowing what to say or how to introduce it irks me. So if it feels like I’m talking to you then please send me some of your music if you want to get involved. I can’t promise that I’ll say “yes” to putting you on one of the compilations, but I’ll definitely have a listen and see if there’s anything we can do to help. The same goes for recommendations – if anyone out there knows of a band or artist that they’d like to hear on the dg then please let us know and we’ll try our best to follow it up.

6. You’ve recently pioneered the first ever (I think) online streaming music festival, and cheers for being so brave. How do you think that went over?

In a nutshell: it was a technological disaster. Like all dg projects it was all fire and enthusiam and no calculated forethought. You can read about the technical problems on the website if you dig around for a post entitled “Dreamstream Forum”, but for anyone who missed it here’s what happened. The idea was to stream as many hours as possible of pre-recorded live music interspersed with commentary and interviews (possibly the world’s “first online music festival”). We got (if memory serves me correctly) 24 contributions including the “adventures of captain caffeine and jitterboy”, a couple of interviews, and together with some improvised commentary provided by yours truly and Ritchie (The Amalfi Glow) we ended up with 9 hours+ to play. My intention was to put these out in episodes throughout the day using one of the podcast sites (Gcast – let this serve as a warning to anyone thinking of trying the same thing). Unfortunately as so many of the contributions came in so late, I was still uploading the finished episodes on the morning of the big day, and it wasn’t until we were a couple of hours into it that I realised that about 7 hadn’t uploaded properly. Cue mad panic behind the scenes as I tried to reupload them, us going “off air” for a couple of hours, eventually playing the ones that had worked out of order totally fucking up the chronological commentary, 5 hours into it comprehending that we couldn’t upload anymore podcasts to our account, trying to set up another podcast account with a different provider, failing, finally figuring to put the missed out episodes directly on the dg website, and Tim from Cozy Home appearing to save our asses by installing a play button. I mean I think that afternoon for 5 hours I was having some kind of major meltdown, just felt really bad that I’d fucked it all up for people who were listening. But I suppose we got there in the end and there was some great music played that you can still hear at the “Dreamstream” link on the website. It’s very much up in the air whether we’ll attempt a Dreamstream 08, but you never know. There’s a long time between now and November for me to put the horror behind me. If we do then we’ll probably be a looking at a different format, maybe videos via You Tube, or acoustic sets only. You can never say never with this thing you know.

7. Tell us about the people behind the scenes, like Tara and Tim, et al. Most know the names, but not everyone knows how closely you work with them, and how much effort it takes to put all this together. How is it working with these folks?

So I’ll start with Tara as it’s probably easier to explain her role in all of this. Essentially she does everything that either (1) I am incapable of doing, or (2) can’t seem to motivate myself to do. It’s perhaps not as simple as that. At the last Cozy Home gathering in virtual space I was saying how I’d love to get more people involved behind the scenes at the dg as there’s always so much needing done and seemingly so little time to do it. It was politely pointed out to me though that Tara is “one in a million” and that finding someone else who is prepared to give up their free time and energy to such a crackpot cause for no cost would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Like I say though, she does a brilliant job of the things that I can’t do and brings a whole other dimension to the dg. For example she’s very organised whereas I am completely scatter-brained. She’s also far more promotionally astute than I am, and much better at putting together words, and computer text. I might be the hamster on the wheel, but without her dropping in and checking that the wheel is still moving freely we’d be burning off a lot of pointless misdirected energy. Tim is also undeniably a legend in the dg family (although he plays a much less visible role). For a start he hosts our website and doesn’t charge us for the priviledge, which I guess you could equate to the idea that without him there wouldn’t even be a wheel for us to run on. I’ve lost count now of the number of pints I’m due him for helping out with the technology. Take for example the newly formed dgRECORDS on the site, he built that for us for nothing and talked me through how to go about putting albums on there – a bit like letting a blind man with no arms into your house to make himself an omelette. It’s not just us that he helps out, he’s also behind all the Cozy Home technology and runs his own record label – www.transatmospheric.com which is well worth checking out. We’ll run a feature on them soon enough, but it’s the hi-fi end of the low-fi spectrum, or the Cozy Home space-station, whichever way you want to look at it. There are others as well, all the bands that wear the dg badge on their websites, and people I can call on (and am likely to incresingly do so) to write up reviews and features. Like you for instance. There’s plenty of room at the boardroom table in our imaginations though so if anyone else wants to get involved then just raise your hand virtually, or hunt me down in the usual places

8. In the age of information, there seems to be oceans of music available for download. Do you think this is a good thing, or does it make finding good music more difficult, wading through all the amateurish sludge that has collected?Good thing? Man, it’s a fucking GREAT thing. Who decides what you listen to? Well even as short a while as ten years ago it was mainly the record companies and the radio stations and the music magazines and whatever you could pick up in a local record store. But now the power is back in your own hands. Ok, so us human beings can be mighty lazy at the best of times and like I said, yes it can be soul-destroying surfing for new sounds… but when you hit a vein, or find something new for yourself it’s a great feeling. You can’t run out of music to listen to anymore, and the term “legendary” only really exists in your own head. Look at it this way – who is going to say more to you or is more likely to connect with how you’re feeling? The big band with the corporation behind it, strategically putting out singles, getting ahead by not what they do but who they know, OR the guy/girl who is untouched by all of that circus, who is making music purely for the love of making music, who has an amazing voice, or writes incredible songs, or plays something nobody else has imagined, albeit on a shitty little 4 track or home pc? I’ve spoken already about how the DIY-revolution has really reignited my love of music again, and I appreciate that it’s not for everybody, but I urge anybody who is reading this to give these little folk a chance, or a little of your time, and you won’t be disappointed. Subjectively labelling something as “amateurish sludge” does not necessarily mean that it’s not going to connect with someone somewhere, or that it’s not going to be great music that changes your life. As Walt Whitman (I think) once spouted: “Delve! Mould! Pile the words of the earth! Work on age after age! Nothing is to be forgotten…” Hundreds of years from now, who is going to be saying more about what it is like to be us? Us or someone else?

9. Think of yourself twenty years from now. Do you see the Daydream Generation spawning a new generation of online music communities after we’re all dried up?

Online music community. I know there’s a bit more to “it” than that, but I think that’s probably about as close a description regarding what we’re doing as we’re going to get at this particular stage. Obviously we’re not the only online music community, or even the only people who have gone down this road – I mean the Cozy Home in many ways is the older brother of what we’re doing here and from time to time you stumble across other pockets of resistance. It seems like a very logical step in the evolution of what is happening though to congregate and find some degree of belonging and recognition somewhere, so I’d assume that as time drifts by that we’ll see more and more collectives of musicians who see that there is “strength in numbers”. I’m always very open to working with like-minded communities such as Your Psych Tunes, Splendid Isolation, Psychedelic Velveeta! to name a few, as we’re all singing off the same page. As long as it’s being done out of a love for helping unsigned bands and artists get heard, and not from some financial motivation, I figure we’ve all got a lot to learn from each other, and are even stronger working together. If you are really asking me “Will the Daydream Generation be going 20 years from now?” then I’ve got to say that I really don’t know. I’d like to think so. I mean, I’ve already told Smally Jr (aged 3) that one day he will “inherit Daddy’s chocolate factory”. But on the flipside it would probably frighten you to know how many times my finger has hovered over the “delete my account” button on MySpace. I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out what happens next.

Interview by Monty L

I thought I’d at least attempt to keep you all updated with what is happening over here once a month, but it only seems like yesterday that I was sitting here typing away like an idiot. So for what it’s worth, here is the DG News:

DG4

Thanks to everybody who has managed to download our last compilation, and cheers for all of the positive feedback. Yeah it’s good, I know that. But please take some time out to drop in on the bands whose songs you liked (most of the links are here on the site but are still being updated). After all, it’s the bands and artists who contribute that this project is all about, not the project itself. Dig?

Last count there has been 54 downloads in the last week. That’s alright, but it could be A LOT better. For all that we can flood MySpace with bulletins and blogs, I suspect that sooner or later that we’ll start getting on people’s tits. So we need you to help – whether you’re a band involved, or a humble fan of what we’re doing, please post something somewhere, anywhere – and send some traffic our way.

HERE’S HOW ELSE YOU CAN HELP

1 Wear the DG badge on your MySpace profile or on your website (info on this site if you dig around, or on our MySpace blog)

2 Ever fancied yourself as a Indie music journalist? We’re desperately needing articles for this site – album reviews, interviews, features, or something else you might have in mind. Drop us a line at daydreamgen@gmail.com with any ideas and we’ll try and get back to you.

3 Sign up to Tara’s MAILING LIST. Please! For fuck’s sake. You know it sort of makes sense.

4 Post a blog on your MySpace page with a link to the site. Post a bulletin to your MySpace friends telling them to go and get some great FREE music pronto. If you dabble on a music forum then namedrop the project. Post a link on your Facebook page, on your Bebo page, on whatever page you’ve got. If you’ve got a Blog of your own then post a link and we’ll return the favour. A little exposure goes a long way. Walt Whitman knew it. And Alexander Trocchi knew it. So you should know it too.

DAYDREAM GENERATION STORE

Ok, so we’re working on this. Well, technically the mighty Tim of Cozy Home/Transatmospheric infamy is working on this. The idea is to cut out the middle man, the corporate host who takes a cut of your money if you’re selling MP3 versions of your album. Due to space on the site it’s likely going to be very limited, so unfortunately don’t go calling us on this one, we’ll call you. If however you make a stunning album and it somehow falls into our laps then we’ll consider putting it out for you. We’ll be catering for artists who want to give their albums away for free, artists who want to give it away for free with a “donate” button, and artists who want to charge for the priviledge of owning their music. Whatever floats your boat. And we’ll be kicking of with Warchalking’s second album “Stratum” just as soon as we can – it will be available to download exclusively from here, and I swear this thing is a masterpiece… more info in the next few days.

DG5

So only if you’ve been sleeping through the last 3 months will you have not noticed that the format for future compilations will be to submit a song to the ongoing “Singles” project on this site. The doors are well and truly open again, so start sending your songs with a cover picture to the usual place (daydreamgen@gmail.com) and we’ll start working through it. Shortly I’ll be doing the rounds trying to get recommendations for bands that you’d like to hear on future comps and will be strapping on the old miner’s helmet to go in search of the next big thing. But if you want to pre-empt me contacting you then give me a shout. The format for the Singles will slightly change in that we’ll also be including a brief blurb/bio to go with each song, along with a link to the band’s website, but we’ll cross those bridges when we comes to them. And if we can’t cross them, then we’ll just burst on through.

…and finally something for the Statisticians

Thought somebody out there might be curious to see how far we have come in the last year. Bearing in mind that we have relocated internet site several times during that year (most notably during the summer of 2007) here are the number of unique visitors who have dropped in at www.daydreamgeneration.com since it first began. The last time I checked we were the 6,434,256th most popular website in the world, but the only way is up with your help as discussed. Actually, technically that’s not true, we could go backwards, but it would take some serious wind-change or technical hitches for that to happen:

Apr 07    305

May 07   373

Jun 07    430

Jul 07     1221

Aug 07    339

Sep 07    235

Oct 07    451

Nov 07   1446

Dec 07    1954

Jan 08    2151

Feb 08   1449*

Mar 08 (to date)   1111

*fuck, someone mustn’t have been pulling their weight in February.

Until tomorrow

Smally

Out Today!

See the “DG4″ link at the top of the page for more information. 2 discs worth of music from bands you may not have been fortunate enough to discover yet – including The PlaygrounD, Jane Gilmore, Cashew Cook, Rough Giraffe, Fig Mints, The Shivas, Dead Canaries, Becky N, Rollercoaster, Uberfuzz, Allan Douglas and The Tragedies, The Davey Parker Radio Sound, Cody High School, The Real Burnouts, The Passerines, Holy Roller, The Bordellos, The Myrrors, The Soft Sunflower, Anandamide, The Spitshine Kid, The Wheelies, AMF, The Electric Mainline, Isokon Flats, Naked Radio, The Depravations, Magical Odyssey, Toy Soldiers, Periwinkle Periscope, Milo Bellamy, The Virgo 9, Sucks To Lala Land, Ghodbane, Dave Stine, Warchalking, Man On The Moon, Sirens, Hopeful Monster, and Broken Mono.

So our 1st birthday flew by under the radar. Earliest official trace of the DG existing is 26th February 2007 when the MySpace page was set up. It’s been a busy year: 3 compilations, 1 online music festival, 1 Best Of, 640 minutes of music, various websites, relentless technical hitches, and more great bands than I can count on my fingers and toes. Thanks to everyone who has helped and continues to help make this daydream a reality. You know who you are. Possibly. 

7th March 2008

Is it that time already? The last month since I wrestled with font trying to explain what 2008 would hold in store for us seems to have flown in. So before everything goes interstellar over here, I thought I would give anyone who frequents this neck of the woods a heads up aboutwhat is going on behind the scenes:THE DG BADGEOk, here’s the deal. We work long unpaid hours mining the Net in search of brilliant music, we clumsily approach bands and artists begging them for songs, and then we generate free daydreams for your ears. And now you can help us back – by wearing the DG Badge on your website or MySpace page, just to show us a little support and possibly send a bit of traffic our way. If you can (and of course you don’t have to) could you post the following code somewhere on your webpage or MySpace profile:<a href=”http://daydreamgeneration.com” target=”_blank”><imgsrc=”http://members.wwisp.com/~tara/images/dg_badge_CG.jpg” border=”0″></a>It should look like this:Pretty cool huh? (Tara take a bow) (Again).Like I say, we’re not going to be out after dark looking around for folk that really should have a badge like this, and I appreciate that some of you very switched on individuals already have a link to our website. But for those of you who don’t, well we don’t ask for a lot in return for promoting your music, or arranging free music for you, so hopefully it’s not a lot to ask.DG4Yes it’s that time again. The first compilation of 2008 is just about ready to BLASTOFF. Collating and arranging all the songs that have kindly been donated to the “Singles” project into two zip files that will fill a couple of CDs for you, and provide an eclectically poptastically psychedelically quixodelic strange soundtrack for your Spring. Or Autumn depending on which side of the globe you spin on. The promotional campaign will no doubt put the Democratic presidential nominations to shame and on a much tighter budget too. So just to warn you. Thanks to a carefully concocted blend of the new and the familiar, DG4 is going to be something pretty special. So get your download finger ready.RECRUITMENT!I’ve tried this before and failed miserably, but will try again. As you can see, me and Tara with a little help from some friends do a reasonably good job of keeping this big wooden ship of a musical project floating in some kind of direction. Where we are bound it is still too early to say, but the truth is that we could probably do it a whole lot better with a few more hands on the wheel. Going into 2008 The Daydream Generation is all about getting some momentum going and some magic wind in the sails. If you’ve got a bit of free time and an interest in discovering and championing great largely undiscovered music then we could do with the help. In particular I’m thinking about things like – helping to run our MySpace site, arranging artwork for the compilations, having a say on the various projects, putting together Dreamstream Radio podcasts, helping us to turn technology to our advantage, reviewing music… the list goes on and on. If you’re interested at all then drop me a line at smallywheelies@gmail.com – like I said to Tara when she first got involved, the pay is pretty shit, but the work is as rewarding a hobby as it gets. You get to meet some interesting people (often beautiful, but more often than not crazy). You get to discover new music. And you hopefully have a positive impact on the world, by helping great musicians get some recognition, and by influencing people who accidentally tune in. I’m not expecting a rush to the door to fill up the seats around the boardroom table, but in this case then if nobody steps forward then I will be coming out after dark to hunt down the folk I think should be involved. You have been warned. It will not be pretty. I have bad eyesight and have a tendency to stumble in the dark.ALBUMSYou might have noticed that there is a new section entitled “ALBUMS” at the top of the page. Then again you might not have. I can’t really say too much at this stage, but I will say that this will herald an exciting new stage in the DG’s relatively short-lived existence. Just keep watching this space over the next few weeks.And that as they say, is that.Just going back to the ship analogy before I go. We might be the ones turning the wheel, but the Daydream Generation couldn’t stay afloat without the continued support and cooperation of the individuals and bands who make up the compilations, and rise to the occasion whenever the occasion calls. So I just want to say thanks. I think we might be getting somewhere.Smally….

Talking of which. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be setting up a second MySpace page purely for artists who have featured on previous compilations, or are due to feature on up and coming projects. The main reason is simply that MySpace only has 40 places in its top friend list, and we’ve got a lot more than 40 top friends that we want to continue championing. Having a unique page will be a place where people who genuinely want to go and hear new exciting & honest music can easily access your bands and songs. In conjunction with that I’ll be redoing the – shit, this has suddenly gone bold and I can’t work out how to get it off – anyways, where was I? Oh yes, in conjunction with the second MySpace page, I’ll be redoing the “SHOP” section at the top of the website, instead aiming to have a single place where there are links to all the DG featured artists’ webpages and MySpace sites, bands both past and present, profile pictures, links to where you can buy or download records by said artists, songs where available you can play direct from the site, and hopefully a brief bio. It – feck, now it’s gone italic on me – (note to self: type on you’re running out of a lunch hour) – it’s going to take a bit of work obviously, but we’ll get there. I’ll get there.

Ah, that’s better!Also make sure to check out some of the links at the bottom right of the site. I want to try and create some kind of “Psychedelic Umbrella” down there, not just links to people who have helped out the project from day 1 – such as Beth (Bad Muffin) who designed our cool new lightbulb logo – cheers Beth! (insert smiley with shades) – but also to cover organisations and other projects that are places worth visiting if you are an unsigned musician making the sort of music we play here. So if anyone’s got any tips on people you think would be worthwhile me putting links to then let me know – daydreamgen@gmail.comSame goes for bands and artists you’d like to hear featured. I said on the MySpace Blog that it helps when you guys recommend someone to us and keep it in the family.Ok, so that’s my lunch hour over. I’ve typed like a loon. And probably sounded like one too. I just wanted to say Happy New Year to you all, and to try and give you a keyhole peek into what’s happening behind the scenes. It sounds like a lot, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg, I didn’t even get a chance to talk about the proposed mp3 store, or the t-shirts, or the fact that nobody has completed The Maze, or the fact that Splendid Isolation have a 3rd podcast well worth checking out featuring Sgt Dunbar and Jon Of The Atom… ah, there’s just so much and so very little time.So bye for nowSmally

Just in case anyone missed it. Click on the “BEST OF” link at the top of the site to download for FREE & for more information about the project.

After this we will put together the final listing of songs for our last free download of the year. So before it’s too late & your favourite band/song doesn’t get the recognition they deserve, then please go here:

http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/?p=37

and take part in this rare moment of DG democracy.If a band features multiple times at the top end of the list then we’ll use their most popular song. If a couple of songs are tied then I’ll run them past Smally Jr’s ears. For now here’s the pick of your pops:Dylan Gough – If The World 8Rollercoaster – Space Rockin’ (Got Me Down On My Knees) 8The Virgo 9 – My Love 8Rollercoaster – I Guess You Sold Your Soul 7Rollercoaster – Slide It On 7The Shivas – Big Man 7Alright Lights – I’m On Fire 6Cashew Cook – Morning Sun 6Dylan Gough – Dinosaurs 6The Invisible Mouth – Colour My World 6River Speak English – Puzzle Piece 6Rocketships Of Love – Crimson & Clover 6The Wheelies with Warning! Heat Ray! – When The Morning Comes 6

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The first ever DREAMSTREAM live online music festival began at 2pm UK time and we played live sets from some brilliant bands, all in different locations around the globe, and each of them making great music across a range of genres. From the bedroom floor, to the studio, from noisy bars to that little tent at the bottom of your back garden, there’s guaranteed to be something for everyone, so please take some time and visit the Dreamstream07 link at the top of the page where you can hear how it all happened.

4th Nov 07

We set up this forum for you to drop in and say a hello from wherever you are, either to leave us a picture, show some support, maybe even tell us what you had for breakfast – but most of all we hope you enjoy the music that these bands are playing for free, and for you.

A free downloadable double-disc “highlights” compilation of the Dreamstream festival will follow in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for listening.

Thanks to everyone who voted & helped.

The final results & full tracklisting will be with you just as soon as we can get our shit together.

Firstly as you may have noticed, we have moved. Again. But as you can see, this format of site was just too good to resist. For the first time, you can register and get involved and say hello. I’ll set up a section where everyone can post updates about gigs, or new songs, or… well fuck knows what else, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Further, this sets us up nicely for Dreamstream 07 as we’ll be able to interact in the same place. We’re collectively owe Tim who set this up more pints than I can count on my fingers and toes, so if you’re on that side of the Atlantic and you see him, then buy him a drink for me.

Apart from the shiney new site there’s quite a bit going on behind the scenes. In the next couple of weeks, the Dreamstream festival will start to gather momentum. There’s been really positive feedback about the idea, and if everyone pulls through that says they are going to, then we should be in for a brilliant day of live music and rambling banter. Cheers to those of you who have already sent your sets in & best of luck to those who are about to record something. All the info is in the Dreamstream 07 section at the top of this site about how to contribute, but if you’ve got any queries then drop me a line at daydreamgen@gmail.com and I’ll try my best to get back to you. Things have been a bit hectic back here recently and I’m still working through a load of emails and messages on MySpace, so apologies if it takes a while to get back to you.

As you’ll hopefully be aware, the most articulate and spohisticated of all the Daydream Generators (Miss Tara) has been busy putting together a series of “Get To Know” the bands, and is posting them on our MySpace blog, between now and the day of the festival (28th Oct). I’ve got to say that aside from being a talented bunch of musicians, you lot are also a load of funny fuckers.

While Tara has been busy doing something productive and making you all laugh, I have been up to my elbows, doing something completely idiotic and pointless in the shape of The Daydream Maze/band bios section on the now old googlepages site. The Maze is now open and it’s possible to puzzle it out, but there are still a lot of loose ends to tie up, some profiles to be linked in, and I’m going to be trawling You Tube to start posting videos. Couple are there already if you can find them. There’s a prize for the first person who can complete the Maze, but I’ll not spoil it for you. You’ll need to go check it out for yourself (link is in the “links” section on this site).

Aside from all that, you might have noticed the appearance of a “shop” at the top of this site. You won’t be able to buy any albums directly from The Daydream Generation site – but this will hopefully direct you to the places where you can buy and download DG artist’s music. If you’d like any of your albums there then give me a shout.

With the highlights from the Dreamstream festival going on to form DG4, plans for DG5 are being hatched as I write this. More info to follow, but it promises to be another bizarrely special project.

And that’s about that. I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve forgotten, but fuck it. There’s dishes to be done.

Please register for the site, check in regularly, say hello, and get involved. The albums can be downloaded for free, but the accidental musical community that has grown out of these things you just couldn’t buy.

More to come as and when and if.

Smally